The NFL shed a few million viewers going with Netflix over broadcast television on Christmas Day, but still generated two of its largest audiences ever on the holiday.
Wednesday’s Ravens-Texans and Chiefs-Steelers NFL Christmas Day games averaged 24.3 and 24.1 million viewers respectively across Netflix and CBS stations in the home markets, per Nielsen fast-nationals — both surpassing a Chiefs-Dolphins Wild Card game on Peacock in January (22.8M) as the most-watched NFL games ever on a streaming service.
Viewership for the games peaked at 27 million for a performance by Beyoncé during halftime of Ravens-Texans.
As anyone would have reasonably expected, both games finished about five million viewers shy of last year’s equivalent Christmas Day windows, which aired on over-the-air broadcast television. Chiefs-Steelers declined 18% from Raiders-Chiefs on CBS (29.5M) and Ravens-Texans declined 16% from Giants-Eagles on FOX (29.0M).
While all three of last year’s Christmas games ranked among the nine most-watched games that season, this year’s matchups rank 12th and 16th respectively — more-than-respectable given the platform and the lopsided nature of both games.
If down from last year, the games still rank among the league’s ten most-watched on Christmas Day dating back to 1989, with Ravens-Texans ninth and Chiefs-Steelers tenth. This year’s average of slightly more than 24 million viewers is also the second-highest for the NFL on Christmas since 1995 — clocking in ahead of the league’s 2022 tripleheader (22.1M) and 2021 doubleheader (20.9M).
As has been the case with games on Peacock and Amazon, Netflix attracted a younger audience than is typical for an NFL game, with Ravens-Texans delivering the league’s largest Christmas Day audience on record among adults under 35 (dating back to 2001).
The NFL did not originally plan to play games on Christmas this year, which fell on a Wednesday — a day of the week on which few NFL games have ever been scheduled. The league abruptly changed course earlier this year, citing the strong viewership performance it has generated on Christmas of late, and struck a deal with Netflix in May that included both of this year’s games and at least one Christmas game per year the next two seasons.
Viewership for the Christmas games fell well short of the more than 100 million viewers Netflix reported for its Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing fight last month, but that was a worldwide figure and not calculated by Nielsen — rendering any comparison apples-to-oranges.
