It may be the case that the Super Bowl never falls short of a viewership record again.
Fox Sports said Monday that it expects Sunday’s Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl 59 to average an audience of 126 million viewers across FOX, FOX Deportes, Tubi, Telemundo and NFL digital properties, per Nielsen fast-nationals and internal first party data, which would surpass last year’s Super Bowl to rank as the largest U.S. television audience on record.
The projected audience includes nearly 14 million viewers alone via Tubi, the free Fox-owned streaming service that carried a 4K stream of the game. That figure — a first-party internal estimate — would rank as the highest ever for the Super Bowl on a streaming service.
The Eagles’ blowout win, which Fox says peaked at 135.7 million viewers in the 8 PM ET quarter-hour, also comfortably outdrew the previous matchup between Philadelphia and Kansas City two years ago, which averaged 115.1 million viewers.
It of course defies logic that a Super Bowl in which Philadelphia led 40-6 would top last year’s overtime thriller to rank as the most-watched on record, but there is some precedent. Super Bowl 48 in 2014 was the most-watched ever at the time, despite Seattle routing Denver by 35 points.
At this stage in the ratings game, actual viewing habits are a secondary consideration to how those habits are being measured. Nielsen last week expanded its out-of-home viewing sample from two-thirds of homes to the entire country, and this fall will begin incorporating first-party data into its estimates. It is entirely possible that these adjustments will result in more accurate estimates of viewer behavior, but — as was the case with the inclusion of out-of-home viewing in 2020 — they will also result inevitably in favorable comparisons to past years.
