ANIMAL PLANET SCORES BIG WITH ITS LARGEST "PUPPY BOWL" AUDIENCE EVER, BRINGING IN MORE THAN NINE MILLION VIEWERS

(Silver Spring, MD) - Animal Planet's PUPPY BOWL VII packed in viewers on Sunday to earn a ratings touchdown, drawing in its largest audience ever with 9.2 million unique P2+ viewers across the entire 12-hour marathon. With an average of more than 1.7 million P2+ viewers for its premiere, PUPPY BOWL VII was up 60 percent from the previous year during the 3-5 PM ET/PT time slot.

With Animal Planet bringing together playful pups and purring kittens with the "ruffness" of the gridiron, ratings for PUPPY BOWL VII exceeded the 1.0 mark for the first time ever, earning a 1.2 HH rating, which was up 50 percent from a year ago. PUPPY BOWL VII also achieved its highest viewership ever across all key demos and surpassed its previous year's ratings among P25-54 (726k, +65%), W25-54 (445k, +63%) and M25-54 (281k, +69%).

PUPPY BOWL VII also punched it into the end zone for Animalplanet.com with 4.6 million page views, up 30 percent from the previous year, and helped bring in 378,319 daily unique visitors to the site on Sunday, a 47 percent increase from 2010.

Animal Planet's 360-degree approach to generating buzz for PUPPY BOWL VII also led to huge gains in the social media space. PUPPY BOWL VII dominated the overall Twitter conversation on Super Bowl� Sunday. Three PUPPY BOWL VII related topics made it into Twitter's top trending topics with #puppybowl only second to #SuperBowl - a paid media placement. Overall, the trending topic terms - Puppy Bowl and #puppybowl - combined for a more than 16,000 mentions that reached an estimated 12 million Twitter users. In the week leading up to the 12-hour marathon event, Facebook's PUPPY BOWL VII fan page doubled its fan count.

PUPPY BOWL VII is Animal Planet's answer to the Super Bowl� giving viewers the chance to get into a different game with tackles, fumbles and fouls from rambunctious pups that just can't get enough of the action. The "game" takes place in Animal Planet Stadium's custom football field and features an array of puppies including everything from spunky spaniels to baby bassets to mixed breeds as they give their all to make the big plays. All of the animals featured in PUPPY BOWL VII are adoptable and came from 30 rescue and shelter groups representing 18 states and U.S. territories.

PUPPY BOWL VII and the BISSELL(R) KITTY HALF-TIME SHOW are productions of Discovery Studios. For Discovery Studios, Rob Burk is the executive producer. Melinda Toporoff is the executive producer for Animal Planet.