The NFL’s oldest rivalry delivered a record audience for one of the league’s newest partners, as Prime Video broke a weeks-old streaming record with its Packers-Bears Wild Card Game.
Saturday’s Packers-Bears NFC Wild Card Game averaged a 12.5 rating and 31.61 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video (including local over-the-air simulcasts in the home markets), marking the highest rated and most-watched NFL game on a streaming service. The previous highs were a 9.6 rating for last year’s Steelers-Ravens Wild Card game on Prime Video and 27.52 million viewers for last month’s Lions-Vikings Christmas Day game on Netflix.
The Bears’ comeback win, which peaked with 34.16 million in the 9:15 PM ET quarter-hour, increased 43% from Steelers-Ravens on Prime Video in the same Saturday night window last season (22.07M). It also increased 38% from Dolphins-Chiefs on Peacock two years ago, the first NFL playoff game to air primarily on a streaming service (22.86M).
While Nielsen has changed its methodology considerably just since those two games — expanding its out-of-home viewing sample last February and then shifting to a new “Big Data + Panel” methodology in September — those changes are unlikely to account for such growth.
In addition to hitting a streaming high, Packers-Bears was the most-watched Saturday Wild Card game since Titans-Patriots on CBS in January 2020, which ended up being Tom Brady’s final game with New England (31.42M). It comfortably surpassed the previous high over that span — 27.7 million for Raiders-Bengals on NBC in 2022 — though again that comes with the caveats regarding Nielsen methodology.
As goes without saying, viewership outpaced the Rams-Panthers game on FOX earlier in the day, which drew 27.98 million viewers. It also topped NBC’s Chargers-Patriots Wild Card game the following night (28.9M across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics), though it trailed both of the Sunday afternoon Wild Card windows — 41 million for 49ers-Eagles on FOX and 32.71 million for Bills-Jaguars on CBS.
Packers-Bears was arguably the most attractive game of the weekend on paper and lived up to the billing, with Chicago mounting a stirring comeback from 21-3 down. It was something of an upset that the game ended up in the Saturday night Prime Video window rather than Sunday afternoon on FOX. While the two previous playoff games on streaming services were both high-profile matchups, Packers-Bears was a matchup of historic rivals who have hardly ever met in postseason, and who were coming off of two memorable regular season meetings in the final month of the season.
