Fox Sports has projected an exceptional viewership for the recent Super Bowl, estimating an average audience of 126 million viewers across both television and streaming services for the Philadelphia Eagles’ 40-22 win against the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night.
This year’s event was broadcast by a variety of networks including Fox, Fox Deportes, and Telemundo, in addition to being streamed on Tubi and the NFL’s online platforms.
The estimates provided by Fox on Monday incorporated early figures from Nielsen along with streaming data from Tubi and the NFL. More comprehensive updates were anticipated to be released on Tuesday.
If confirmed, this would mark the second consecutive year the Super Bowl has achieved record-breaking viewership. Last year, the exciting matchup between the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, where the Chiefs triumphed with a score of 25-22 in overtime, averaged 123.7 million viewers across various channels, including CBS and Nickelodeon.
Fox reported that viewership peaked at an impressive 135.7 million during the second quarter of the game.
Early estimates suggest that approximately 14.5 million viewers opted to watch the game on streaming services, with 13.6 million tuning in via Tubi, where the game was accessible for free.
Some of this increased viewership can be linked to a shift in the methodology for counting viewers. This year marks the first instance in which Nielsen is accounting for out-of-home viewers in all states except Hawaii and Alaska.
Previously, the viewer tally was limited to the top 44 media markets, which represented about 65% of the U.S. population.
In addition to traditional cable and satellite boxes, the ratings now also factor in data from smart TVs.
Following two years of tightly contested Super Bowls, this year’s game was largely decided by halftime, as Philadelphia surged ahead with a commanding 24-0 lead.
The event also featured notable attendees such as former President Donald Trump and pop star Taylor Swift. Trump made history as the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, while Swift’s relationship with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has kept many of her followers engaged with the NFL.
For the third year in a row, the Super Bowl has attracted over 100 million viewers, an impressive turnaround considering that four of the five Super Bowls leading up to 2023 struggled to reach that milestone due to the decline in traditional cable subscriptions. The 2021 Super Bowl, featuring a matchup between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs, recorded a TV-only average of 95.2 million, which was the lowest since 2007.
In the realm of the NFL playoffs, viewership during the first three weekends averaged 35.2 million, reflecting a 9% drop from last year’s record average of 38.5 million.
This decrease followed a regular season that drew an average of 17.5 million viewers—while it ranked as the sixth-highest average since 1995, it represented a slight decline of 2% compared to 2022.
