The first NFL game on Peacock averaged a reasonably decent audience.
Saturday’s Bills-Chargers NFL regular season game averaged a 3.0 rating and 7.33 million viewers on the NBC streaming service Peacock, a figure that includes over-the-air simulcast viewership on the NBC affiliates in Buffalo and Los Angeles. Per a source, those simulcasts averaged 1.12 million viewers (746K in LA and 374,000 in Buffalo). That would leave the Peacock-only audience in the low six million range.
The Bills’ narrow win, which peaked with 8.3 million viewers in the fast-nationals, was television’s most-watched primetime program on Saturday night. For the day, it ranked second among sportscasts behind Bengals-Steelers on the NBC broadcast network. That game, as previously noted, averaged 14.29 million.
Bills-Chargers delivered the sixth-smallest Nielsen-measured audience of the NFL season, ahead of only three early morning games from London and two Monday Night Football games that overlapped with competing coverage on ABC. It averaged fewer viewers than any Thursday Night Football game on Amazon Prime since Week 10 of last season, when Falcons-Panthers averaged 6.8 million.
Only by the standards of the NFL could an audience of seven million qualify as low. To put the numbers in perspective, Bills-Chargers averaged around the same audience as the Oregon-Washington college football game on ABC in October (7.0M).
Peacock is one of the smallest platforms to ever carry an NFL game. At the most recent count, the service had 28 million subscribers. (That figure is likely to have increased in advance of Saturday’s game.)
The service will carry an exclusive NFL playoff game over Wild Card weekend next month.
