[SPOILER] Last night, NBC aired the third season finale of The Sing-Off and crowned the winners of the a capella competition. Pentatonix, a five-person ensemble from Arlington, Texas, took home a Sony recording contract and $200,000. Will there be more winners and a fourth season of The Sing-Off or, will the TV series be cancelled instead?

Hosted by Nick Lachey, The Sing-Off began as a short-run series with just four episodes in December of 2009. It did reasonably well (a 2.3 in the 18-49 demographic with 6.9 million viewers) and was cheap to produce so the peacock network brought it back for season two. It returned the following December and was expanded to five episodes. That renewal paid off and the ratings rose 26%, to an average of a 2.9 in the demo with 8.6 million viewers.

NBC decided to take another chance and give The Sing-Off a two-hour timeslot on the fall schedule and 11 episodes. That gamble didn’t pay off and the ratings have been terrible.

The Sing-Off began this season with a disappointing 1.9 rating in the demographic with 5.3 million viewers. The numbers never got any better they dropped as low as a 1.3 rating, less than half of its worst demo rating last season. The show’s consistently been in fourth place in its timeslot and has lost 40% in the demo season-to-season.

The reality competition is the second-highest non-scripted show on the network but, given the state of the rest of NBC’s schedule, that’s not saying much.

Will NBC cancel The Sing Off? If the network were in better shape, of course they would. As things are, I suspect NBC will bring it back for another season but give it either a summer or holiday run, when competition and expectations are far lower.

In retrospect, they probably shouldn’t have messed with the success they’d been having with it.

But, what do you think? Should Sing-Off return for another season or are you done with it?

Image courtesy NBC.