The FOX Sports presentation of Super Bowl LIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs averaged 127.7 million viewers on FOX, FOX Deportes, Telemundo and NFL digital properties. This officially breaks the previous record established for last year’s championship game of 123.7 million viewers, marking record-high viewership for the Super Bowl and the most-watched television program in U.S. history.
The game peaked with 137.7 million viewers during the 8 to 8:15 p.m. EST quarter-hour, which aligns with the second quarter of the game. FOX Sports also shared that the broadcast of the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show featuring Kendrick Lamar averaged an all-time high of 133.5 million viewers, indicating a 3% year-over-year increase. Spanish language coverage on FOX Deportes and Telemundo reached an average of 1.87 million combined viewers.
“The power the NFL has to bring people together was on full display Sunday night and FOX Sports was honored to showcase every moment for football fans across America,” Eric Shanks, chief executive officer and executive producer of FOX Sports, said in a statement. “From the heart of New Orleans on Bourbon Street, to telling moving stories throughout the broadcast and finally presenting an unmatched game production, we couldn’t be prouder to show that FOX is Football with a Super Bowl viewing audience for the record books.”
The contest accrued record-high streaming viewership on Tubi and NFL digital properties with 14.5 million consumers watching the game. Tubi was measured to have independently delivered 13.6 million viewers for the contest, which was streaming in 4K on the streaming platform. Viewership data for the game is provided by Nielsen Fast Nationals and Tubi/NFL first-party analytics. Final average viewership numbers for the game indicates the fifth consecutive year of viewership growth for the championship game.
Compared to the previous year, average viewership for the Super Bowl was up 3%. FOX last broadcast the Super Bowl to close the 2022 season and averaged 115.1 million viewers across all platforms, indicative of this iteration of the contest achieving 9.47% higher viewership. The five-hour FOX Super Bowl LIX Pregame averaged 23.4 million viewers from 1 p.m. EST to kickoff, the strongest performance for such a program beginning at this time on record. Pre-kick programming averaged 82.5 million viewers, which is up 9% from the 75.8 million viewers that tuned in at this time last year.
The city of New Orleans last hosted the Super Bowl in 2013 when the Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers, ending with an average of 108.9 million viewers on CBS. Out-of-home viewership for this year’s game measured by Nielsen Media Research covers 100% of the contiguous television population in the United States, up from 66% in the previous year, and is now implemented for overnight and Big Data + Panel ratings.
The 40-22 victory by the Eagles over the Chiefs marked the second Super Bowl championship in the last seven seasons. Furthermore, it marked the first occurrence in which seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady was behind the microphone for the contest, completing the first season in a 10-year deal with FOX Sports reportedly worth a total of $375 million. Brady was joined by play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt, calling his second Super Bowl for the network, along with sideline reporters Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi and rules analyst Mike Pereira.
Fox Corporation is in the third year of a 10-year media rights deal with the NFL reportedly worth $2.25 billion annually. The NFL has the ability to opt out of the deal and most of its other domestic media rights contracts following the 2029 season. FOX will broadcast the Super Bowl again at the conclusion of the 2028 season from a locale yet to be announced. The next three Super Bowl championship games will be televised by Comcast (NBC/Peacock), The Walt Disney Company (ESPN/ABC) and Paramount Global (CBS/Paramount+), respectively.
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