Super Bowl LVI, featuring the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals, attracted nearly 112 million viewers, about 14% than last year.
The figures from NBCUniversal and Nielsen showed NBC brought in about 99.2 million viewers while streaming platforms including Peacock added 11.2 million and Telemundo added 2 million.
Last year, the Super Bowl on CBS brought in about 96.4 million people, including 91.6 million on CBS and an average streaming audience of 5.7 million viewers per minute.
NBCU and Nielsen’s ratings totals came in slightly lower than estimates from iSpot.tv’s cross-platform measurement, which tracked an average minute audience of 121 million viewers that tuned into the game on NBC, Telemundo and Peacock in homes and public venues across America. The company also reported an average streaming minute audience up 10.5 million viewers and 15.5 million total viewers, which includes streaming viewership data from connected TV, mobile and tablet consumption provided in partnership with Conviva.
iSpot.tv said Super Bowl viewership peaked during the halftime show, when it scored an overall increase of 12% or 10.5 million net new average minute viewers.
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Roku also shared some platform-specific streaming metrics for the Super Bowl. The company said that approximately 8.6 million households used a Roku device to stream a channel carrying Super Bowl coverage and that streaming channels carrying the Super Bowl saw a 31.7% increase in household reach along with a 31.8% increase in streaming hours during time of gameplay as compared to 2021.
Roku households in the Los Angeles designated market (DMA) area saw a 55.9% year over year increase in streaming hours on channels carrying the game while Roku households in the Cincinnati DMA saw a 60.4% increase.
The numbers from NBC, Nielsen and Roku come after yesterday Samba TV reported 36 million U.S. households, representing more than 1 in 4 U.S. homes, watched this year’s Super Bowl across linear television and streaming platforms. Those figures were good enough for a 12% increase in household viewership from last year’s game.
“In Q4 of 2021, every one of the top five television programs was an NFL game, and that momentum helped linear TV notch its first ratings increase since 2020,” said Cole Strain, head of measurement for Samba TV, in a statement. “We saw that same momentum and excitement for the NFL carry over to this year’s match-up between the Rams and the Bengals with the NFL continuing its ratings winning streak gaining Super Bowl viewership year over year by 12%, reaching 36 million households.”