• by Wayne Friedman , 3 hours ago

The first two weekends of NFL Playoffs -- the Wild card and Divisional rounds -- posted generally higher viewing compared to a year ago.

Viewership for the six games for the wild-card round was up 10% to 31.7 million average viewers versus a year ago.

The following weekend’s Divisional round was virtually flat with year-ago results -- 0.1% higher to 37.4 million, respectively, according to Nielsen.

This is the first TV season with Nielsen’s new "Big Data + Panel" measure, which has seen generally higher viewership over a broad range of programming.

Many records have been broken for 10 games so far -- mostly for all the wild card contests:

--Amazon Prime Video wild card game - Green Bay Packers vs. the Chicago Bears - posted 31.6 million viewers, up 43% from its wildcard game a year ago.

--Fox Television Network posted its biggest wild card result ever -- 41.0 million for the game the San Francisco 49ers won, defeating last year’s Super Bowl champion, the Philadelphia Eagles.

--CBS was 5% higher to a new record for its wild-card game --Buffalo-Jacksonville -- pulling in 32.7 million viewers.

--NBC/Peacock’s Los Angeles Chargers-New England Patriots game earned 32.7 million viewers, up 3% over the year before.

Two weekends of NFL playoff games have seen a 5% bump in national TV advertising revenues to $626.3 million, according to EDO Ad EnGage estimates.

Network leaders for these two weeks include Fox at $166.4 million, followed by NBC at $153.3 million and CBS with $146.1 million.