If you’ve always wanted to be one in a billion, all you had to do was watch this year’s Super Bowl. If you did, you were part of 30 billion viewed minutes of content on Super Bowl Sunday. You don’t get paid anything for this so, settle down. But you were part of a record viewing audience, up five billion minutes from the previous year. Nielsen released these viewing numbers Wednesday, continuing to reveal the massive audience numbers coming from the Kansas City overtime win.
To add a little perspective, 30 million minutes would be just over 57 years. 30 billion minutes is 57,000 years, roughly the length of the Super Bowl drought for the Detroit Lions. It is mind boggling to me that there were enough viewed minutes of a football game to fill 57,000 years. That’s what happens, though, when 123.7 million people watch the same game, and that game is good enough to make certain you stay for the full game, and then some. That is what Kansas City-San Francisco gave us.
While those numbers are silly, it was not the information I was most intrigued by from this Nielsen report. The streaming numbers included were also informative. Want to know where you’ll be streaming sporting events in the future? The answer isn’t clear but, what is, is that the race is on for the leading sports streaming platform. It is, after all, sports rights all networks and streamers want. The numbers don’t lie; as big as the Super Bowl viewing audience was, overall viewing dropped 10% for the remainder of the month of February, sports viewing dropping 60% in that time.
Year over year (February 2023 to February 2024), streaming is up 3% among consumers while cable usage, not surprisingly, dropped by that same 3%. Streaming has now opened a 10% lead over cable, if this were a political race our decision desk would’ve called it by now. In February of 2024, 37% of viewing was done on streaming while 27% was consumed via cable. That number will only continue to grow, and sports will lead the growth. Peacock streaming was up in January but dropped in February, no surprise since January was the month Peacock showed their first exclusive NFL Playoff game. Likewise, Paramount+ saw massive growth in February, up 24% thanks to a portion of those 30 billion viewed minutes of the Super Bowl.
In the battle for the leading streamer, YouTube has taken a commanding lead over Netflix. In February of 2023, the two were in a dead heat with YouTube having 7.9% of the market and Netflix with 7.3%. One year later, the picture is a little different. YouTube is at 9.3% while Netflix is at 7.8%. In what you might notice is a trend, the YouTube numbers began to climb at roughly the same time they were announced as the NFL’s Sunday Ticket streaming partner. In fact, the highest percentages of the 2023 streaming audience owned by YouTube were in months of July through November. Thank you, Sunday Ticket.
Amazon has shown they are in this game to play but who else is a threat to join? The shipping giant/content streamer spends their time in a constant virtual tie for third with Hulu. The combined percentages of the streaming audience that Amazon and Hulu own rarely, if ever, match the audiences of either YouTube or Netflix. There’s probably only one way to significantly close that gap: live sports. Amazon is already in the deep end on that front and appears willing to swim deeper. For Hulu, it is different.
Hulu has live sports but, primarily, through their relationship with ESPN. Would there ever be a scenario in which Hulu exclusively streamed a major sporting event (or ESPN produced it for them)? If they want to go from a distant tie for third into the lead, that may be the only way.
The legendary Ric Flair was well known for his saying, “To be the man, you gotta beat the man.” In the streaming world, YouTube is the man. In the sports steaming world, they are becoming the man. How does anyone else catch them? Break the bank, sports streaming is the only way.
Ryan Brown is a columnist for Barrett Sports Media, and a co-host of the popular sports audio/video show ‘The Next Round’ formerly known as JOX Roundtable, which previously aired on WJOX in Birmingham. You can find him on Twitter @RyanBrownLive and follow his show @NextRoundLive.
