You weren’t alone in not watching Super Bowl LV final Sunday. The uneven matchup, by which the Tampa Bay Buccaneers trounced the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs, was among the many least-watched Super Bowls in current reminiscence, at the same time as extra viewers than ever turned to streaming platforms to look at it.
In keeping with CBS, 96.4 million viewers tuned in throughout all platforms, together with a median of 5.7 million on streaming. That makes it the most-ever live-streamed NFL recreation, CBS says, yet one more signal of the dramatic shift away from conventional cable TV that has solely accelerated through the coronavirus pandemic.
Total, the viewership was down solely barely from final 12 months, when Fox said the massive recreation between the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers averaged 102.1 million viewers. However even with streaming numbers factored in, this 12 months’s Super Bowl didn’t fare particularly nicely.
For a extra direct comparability, Nielsen has launched a year-by-year breakdown of the Super Bowl’s tv viewers going again to 1967. By that metric, the 2021 Super Bowl attracted about 92 million TV viewers, the bottom since 2006, when the Seattle Seahawks took on the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Seahawks even have the excellence of taking part in within the most-watched Super Bowl ever, in 2015, when 114 million folks tuned in to see them pay the New England Patriots.
Plenty of components can doubtlessly have an effect on viewership on any given 12 months, together with the relative attraction of the groups in competitors (the Patriots appear to pack them in as a rule) and the extent of motion throughout the recreation itself. This 12 months got here with the extra problem of the coronavirus pandemic, which put a damper on Super Bowl events throughout the nation and maybe made the sport really feel much less just like the communal occasion it usually is.
You’ll be able to take a look at Nielsen’s full checklist and evaluation here.
