The doubleheader of NFL Christmas Day games airing on Netflix marked a record-breaking day for the league and streaming platform, attaining a global average minute audience of more than 30 million global viewers. Factoring in global viewership, the average minute audience for the opening game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers totaled 30 million viewers. The second matchup of the day, featuring the Baltimore Ravens and Houston Texans, amassed a global average minute audience of 31.3 million viewers.
The Ravens-Texans game ranked No. 1 on the Netflix Global Top 10 for the week and was on the Daily Top 10 list for 62 countries, achieving high viewership in Australia, Austria and Mexico among other countries. Chiefs-Steelers ranked second on the Global Top 10 list and was in the daily Top 10 for 72 countries with high viewership in Canada, Germany and Ireland. Viewers from 218 countries and territories across the globe watched the NFL on Netflix on December 25. According to its latest quarterly earnings report, Netflix has approximately 282.7 million global paid subscribers, and its advertising tier reached 70 million global users two years after its launch.
Netflix revealed that it registered its most-watched Christmas Day ever in the United States, attaining an unduplicated audience of nearly 65 million viewers. Measurements from the Nielsen Big Data + Panel demonstrate that the two games averaged 26.5 million viewers in the country. The two matchups both surpassed the average of 23 million viewers attained by NBCUniversal when it presented an exclusive broadcast of the Chiefs-Dolphins Wild Card round game on Peacock this past January.
The NFL Christmas Day doubleheader on Netflix also earned significant engagement on social media, occupying 10 of the top 12 trending topics on X following Beyoncé’s halftime performance. The league’s Christmas Day games accumulated more than 1 billion impressions on Netflix and NFL global social media handles. CBS Sports produced both of the games, while NFL Media was responsible for pregame, postgame and studio halftime programming productions, with EverWonder Studio executive producing NFL Christmas Gameday. The streaming company has now completed the first season of a three-year deal with the NFL to broadcast Christmas Day games.
Average minute audience viewership figures in the United States are premised on National Live + SD metrics from Nielsen Media Research, including out-of-home viewing, local market viewing on CBS-affiliated stations, the NFL+ direct-to-consumer streaming platform and mobile/web viewing on Netflix. International viewership data is based on first-party Netflix Live + 1 data for television, mobile and web platforms, in addition to NFL reported viewing for league international distributions and NFL Game Pass on DAZN outside of the United States.
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