Mexico set another Spanish-language viewership record in its knockout stage opener, but the far more interesting story is the breakdown between linear and streaming viewership.
Tuesday’s Mexico-Ecuador FIFA World Cup knockout stage match averaged 18.9 million viewers on Telemundo and Peacock, a match window figure that combines Nielsen-measured linear viewership with a streaming audience tracked by Adobe Analytics — the largest audience for a World Cup match on Spanish-language television. The previous high was 14.0 million for Mexico’s group stage match against South Korea.
In what would appear to be a first, the streaming audience tracked by Adobe Analytics (9.7M) exceeded the linear audience measured by Nielsen (8.7M). Both figures were records, with the streaming audience the largest for a soccer match on a Spanish-language outlet and the linear audience the largest in the history of Telemundo.
The Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience has been accounting for a greater percentage of the combined audience. During the group stage, the streaming audience made up 44% of the audience, up from 28% in the 2022 group stage, but the Nielsen linear audience still generated the majority of viewing. That was also the case for the previous record set by Mexico-South Korea, which had a linear Nielsen audience of 7.2 million and an Adobe-measured streaming audience of 6.1 million.
Earlier in the tournament, figures for Telemundo during the first five days of the World Cup (June 11-15) were adjusted downward after a Nielsen revision.
Telemundo is owned by NBCUniversal, which has been combining the Nielsen and Adobe figures for its live events since 2016. At the outset, NBC was not alone in using Adobe Analytics to measure its streaming audience, but it has continued to do so even after competing networks shifted to using Nielsen to measure both linear and streaming viewership. Note that NBCU sells different advertising units on its streaming platforms than on its linear television networks, and it may be the case that those deals are predicated on the use of data from Adobe Analytics. (The purpose of television viewership measurement is to sell advertising.)
As a result, it is possible to break down the linear vs. streaming audience for NBCU events in a way that is not yet possible for programs on other networks. Perhaps it is the case that other sporting events of such scale have had more viewers watch via streaming than on traditional linear television, but with Nielsen issuing one across-all-platforms figure, any such breakdown would not be publicly available.
(It should be noted that FOX did disclose the portion of the audience who watched the United States-Paraguay match on Tubi, with the free streamer contributing 1.13 million to a preliminary audience of 15.99 million. The network has not since disclosed any Tubi-specific figures.)
The same Mexico match averaged a Nielsen-measured 10.43 million on FOX, a figure that includes pre-match coverage — trailing only Morocco-Netherlands the previous night (10.58M) as the most-watched non-U.S. World Cup match on English-language television, excluding the World Cup Final. FOX also averaged 7.925 million for France-Sweden and 5.60 million for Ivory Coast-Norway.
