The Philadelphia Eagles victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX continues to set new viewership records on top of the ones previously set in the days following the contest. The latest Nielsen data released Tuesday shows a record 182.8 million unique viewers watched the game broadcast for at least one minute. This is according to Nielsen’s new ‘Big Data + Panel Reach” methodology.
Last week FOX Sports announced viewership figures averaging 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.
Furthermore, the game broadcast 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.
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.
Nielsen states that the creation and increased adoption of “Big Data + Panel,” which replaced the previously used ‘Total Audience’ metric last month, measures with precision Out-of-Home viewing. Comparing statistics with the new metric, Super Bowl LIX’s reach of 182.8 sets a new standard surpassing last year’s Super Bowl LVIII by roughly 500,000 viewers, making the Eagles win over the Chiefs the highest reported reach in Super Bowl viewership history.
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