West News Wire: Fox hoped that the Super Bowl matchup of two elite teams and a close game would result in a record night.
Fox came close to achieving its objective, despite the fact that Sunday’s game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs came down to a field goal with 8 seconds left.
According to early statistics provided on Monday, the Chiefs’ comeback victory over the Eagles 38-35 is likely to surpass the Golden Girls as the third most viewed television program in history with an estimated 113 million viewers.
According to Fox, the estimated audience includes streaming on Fox and NFL digital sites as well as broadcasts on Fox and Fox Deportes. The statistics were obtained from Adobe Analytics and Nielsen’s Fast National data.
The 2015 game between New England and Seattle on NBC holds the record at 114,442,000 viewers (not including streaming), followed by Super Bowl 51 in 2017 on Fox between Atlanta and New England (113,668,000).
This was Fox’s 10th Super Bowl since it began airing NFL games in 1994 and the second most-watched program in Fox Sports history.
It would also be a slight increase over the 112.3 million average for last year’s Super Bowl. The Los Angeles Rams’ victory over the Cincinnati Bengals was broadcast by NBC and Telemundo and streamed on Peacock and NFL digital sites.
According to Adobe Analytics, this year’s digital feed averaged a Super Bowl-record 7 million streams, an 18% increase over last year (6 million) and more than double Fox’s last Super Bowl in 2020 (3.4 million).
It was the third straight year the streaming average has surpassed 5 million. The first Super Bowl to be streamed, in 2012, averaged 346,000.
Rihanna’s halftime show averaged 118.7 million viewers, making it the second-most watched in Super Bowl history. Katy Perry’s 2015 performance holds the top mark at 121 million.
The Spanish-language audience average for the game was 951,000, a record for the most-watched Super Bowl game in Spanish-language cable television history. It was also the most watched non-soccer event in Spanish-language cable history.
The Spanish-language number is down from last year’s record of 1.9 million on Telemundo, which unlike Fox Deportes has broadcast affiliates in 90 markets.
The Super Bowl has been televised in Spanish in the United States since 2014.
