• by Wayne Friedman , January 3, 2020

NFL 2019 regular-season football posted a strong 5% year-over-year viewership gain for all its national TV games -- averaging 16.5 million, according to Nielsen.

The league also witnessed a 51% rise in digital viewership, to 487,000 from all its digital media outlets -- NFL, Verizon, and TV network broadcast platforms.

The best results continued to come from NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” averaging 20 million Nielsen-measured average viewers -- up 5% from a year before. “SNF” also continued its long nine-year run as TV’s top prime-time series.

Strong NFL gains were also made by Fox’s “Thursday Night Football” 11-game schedule, rising 6% to 15.1 million viewers.

Fox’s Sunday afternoon games grew 7% to 18.3 million, while CBS’ Sunday games were up 3% to 16.7 million. 

Those two networks also posted the five best individual games in terms of overall viewership -- and two of these came on Thanksgiving Thursday:

Buffalo-Dallas (week 13), CBS, 32.6 million; Dallas-New England (week 12) Fox, 29.9 million; Kansas City-New England (week 14) CBS, 28.3 million; Chicago-Detroit (week 13) Fox, 27.1 million; and Dallas-Philadelphia (week 16) Fox, 25.7 million.

Looking at cable-only NFL games, ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” was up 5% to 11.98 million.

Five exclusive NFL Network “Thursday Night Football” games posted a 4% increase to 7.3 million.