Both all-Chinese singles finals received audiences greater than Premier League football matches and NBA basketball games, as Zhang Jike and Wang Hao's men's final attracting 36.6 million unique viewers, and the women's final between Li Xiaoxia and Liu Shiwen pulled in an incredible 50 million viewers.

The men's singles and women's doubles semi-finals also pulled in massive audiences in China, giving the ITTF World Championships four of the top eight most-viewed sports programmes on CCTV this year.

CCTV showed over 60 hours of the action from the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, but there was also wide interest from other regions.

China's Li Xiaoxia attracted an audience of around 50 million in her home country alone when she defeated Liu Shiwen in the women's singles final in Paris

Eurosport provided a record-breaking 32.5 hours of action from the Championships to Europe, with action from the event also reaching Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Chinese Taipei, United States, Mexico, and going out all-over Africa through Al Jazeera, making the tournament the most-widely distributed table tennis tournament in history, excluding the Olympic Games.

With social-media in the form of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many others being used more than ever before, the ITTF World Championships were followed on the web by hundreds of thousands the world over, with the ITTF's YouTube videos bringing in 2.65 million views over the course of two weeks and and the ITTF's Facebook page receiving 2.8 million page impressions in the same period. 

The biennial individual World Championships will take place next in the Chinese city of Suzhou- known as the "Venice of the East"- but table tennis fans have plenty to look forward to in the immediate future, with the Chinese and Japanese Open events coming up next month and the World Team Championships, which are scheduled to be held in Tokyo over next April and May.

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