• by Wayne Friedman , February 15, 2022

NBCUniversal says this year's Super Bowl drew some 112 million average minute total TV viewers  -- up 16% from last year. NBC says the data came from Nielsen.

NBC Television Network pulled in 99.2 million viewers, with 1.9 million on Telemundo; and 11.2 million on streaming via NBC’s Peacock platform, NBC Sports Digital platforms, NFL Digital platforms, Rams and Bengals mobile properties, and Yahoo Sports mobile properties.

NBC TV Network results are up 8% from a year ago.

Nielsen says the 99.2 million viewers NBC Television Network figure also includes out-of-home viewing. The measurement company says the game reached 45 million U.S. TV homes.

A year ago, CBS' total average minute audience for Super Bowl LV was 96.4 million -- 91 million for linear TV and 5.7 million streaming viewers. The 2021 Super Bowl saw the lowest viewing for the game since 2006.

CBS did not disclose out-of-home viewers. In December 2021, Nielsen says it understated out-of-home viewers, going back to September 2020.

For this year's game, another TV measurement company, iSpot.tv, says the audience was much higher than what Nielsen reported -- 121 million average minute viewers. (This would also be some 25% higher than Nielsen-measured results of a year ago -- 96.4 million viewers.)

Breaking down iSpot results, the total linear TV average minute viewers came in at 98.1 million, with streaming video viewing at 10.5 million.

Streaming viewership data comes from CTV, mobile and tablet provided from a iSpot.tv partnership with Conviva. 

An additional 12.5 million came from total out-of-home (OOH) average minute viewers. This measure came from iSpot's partnership with Tunity Analytics.

This year's Super Bowl reached 56% of U.S. households on NBC Television Network, Telemundo and Peacock, according to iSpot.tv. The company says that 70.1% of those streaming the Super Bowl came from “cord cutters” or households without bundled pay TV service.

The Super Bowl ran 81 national ads.

iSpot's Ace Metrix Creative assessment said those ads increased purchase intent to 47%, and that the commercial attention rate was 36% higher than the average across all networks and shows on the day, and the commercial completion rate was 98.6%.

Nielsen's national TV data is derived from a panel of 40,00 U.S. homes.

iSpot.tv data is derived from more than 20 million opt-in smart TV sets.

This story has been updated