Super Bowl LVII Third-Most-Watched TV Show Ever With 113M Viewers: Fox
- by Wayne Friedman , February 13, 2023
Fox says its showing of the Super Bowl, in which the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles in a close game 38-35, was TV's third-most “watched TV show” ever at 113 million viewers when totaling all linear TV and digital platforms.
Fox's 113 million viewers came from the Fox Television Network, Fox Deportes, Fox and NFL digital platforms -- up 1% from the 2022 game on NBC -- its linear TV networks and all digital media platforms.
A year ago, NBC sports said, the 2022 Super Bowl averaged 112.3 million viewers across all linear and digital platforms, according to Nielsen.
Fox's data for this year's game comes from Nielsen Media Research Fast National and Adobe Analytics.
Fox says digital and linear TV results were combined. Final Nielsen Media Research data will be released on Tuesday.
advertisement
advertisement
According to some reported industry estimates, 106 million viewers viewed this year’s game on Fox's linear TV platforms, Fox Television Network and Fox Deportes.
A year ago on NBC, the network said the game on its linear networks -- NBC Television Network and Telemundo -- came in at 101.8 million viewers (NBC, 99.18 million, Telemundo, 1.9 million)
Fox says this year’s Super Bowl TV viewership posted the best audience numbers for the big game in six years since it was aired on Fox in 2017.
Looking at just streaming results, Fox says Super Bowl LVII had the highest results ever-- 7 million streams, up 18% from a year ago, according to Adobe Analytics.
In contrast, a year ago, NBC, says it had 11.2 million viewers watching on streaming and/or digital platforms, according to Nielsen. Digital platforms included NBC’s Peacock platform, NBC Sports Digital platforms, NFL Digital platforms, Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals mobile properties, and Yahoo Sports mobile properties.
This year's halftime show -- The Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show, starring Rihanna -- averaged 118.7 million viewers across Fox Television Network, Fox Deportes, and digital Fox and NFL platforms.
,p> The post-game Super Bowl programming-- which typically gets big lead-out programming viewership following the big NFL match -- scored a big 15.5 million on Fox for the season two premiere of “Next Level Chef”.
Individual local markets this year had Kansas City averaging a 52.0 rating/87 share -- the best of all markets. Philadelphia was next at 46.3 rating/77 share.
Wayne, as I'm sure you know, Nielsen's average commercial minute "viewers" do not include commercial zappers---and there must have been quite a few even for The Super Bowl, nor do they describe the total reach of the game, counting all persons who watched for at least five minutes. As for the "most watched" claims if one uses "viewer" projections , any recent event has a huge edge over an older one because of population growth. Consequently, the number of estimated viewers does not necessarily tell you which game was more popular relative to the size of the population at the time. That requires a tab of Nielsen's current average minute ratings the same way as was done in the past---including ad message zappers---and expressed as a percent of the population, not just the number of "viewers".