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:
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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.