Ahead of kickoff for regular season play in the NFL, preseason viewership remained strong across various platforms despite competing with the end of the Olympic Games Paris 2024. On top of that, inclement weather affected the Hall of Fame Game broadcast earlier in the month on ABC and ESPN, which was suspended with 3:31 to go in the third quarter. Nonetheless, the league still elicited strong viewership throughout its slate of preseason games on television and digital platforms, according to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal.
The league averaged 1.93 million viewers, an approximate 1% increase over last year’s viewership and up 4% from two years ago. Games during the preseason aired across outlets from NFL rightsholders, including Amazon’s Prime Video, ABC/ESPN, NBC Sports, CBS Sports, FOX Sports and NFL Network. The league is entering the second year of collective 10-year media rights deals with the aforementioned companies (excluding NFL Network), reportedly worth more than $10 billion per season.
These viewership metrics started off slowly against the Olympic Games, with all Week 1 games on NFL Network combining for a diminished year-over-year audience by 14%. The second week of the preseason, however, was the best on NFL Network since 2015. In fact, its broadcast of the Detroit Lions’ tilt against the Kansas City Chiefs averaged 2.07 million viewers and garnered the highest viewership during the preseason. FOX Sports also televised a matchup between the New Orleans Saints and San Francisco 49ers that night and drew its best audience for any preseason matchup since it broadcast the Hall of Fame Game in 2021.
The best viewership performance of the preseason came in Week 3 when Sunday Night Football on NBC Sports presented the New England Patriots taking on the Washington Commanders. Building off an Olympic Games that averaged a total audience delivery of 30.7 million viewers across its live Paris prime time and U.S. prime time broadcast windows, the network attained an average of 5.3 million viewers for the preseason matchup.
This goes against the general tendency of the Hall of Fame Game being the most-watched preseason matchup; however, severe weather led to its suspension. The Disney networks of ABC and ESPN averaged 4.93 million viewers for the game, rendering it the least-watched Hall of Fame Game since NFL Network broadcast the annual contest in 2012 and averaged 1.97 million viewers.
National Football League games accounted for 93 of the 100 most-watched television broadcasts in the United States last year, according to data from Nielsen Media Research. The broadcast of Super Bowl LVIII by Paramount Global and its subsidiaries of CBS Sports and Nickelodeon averaged 123.7 million viewers across television and streaming platforms, rendering it the most-watched program in U.S. history. Regular-season games in the NFL averaged 17.9 million viewers, a 7% year-over-year increase and the second-highest total since these averages were first tracked in 1995.
