The first NFL playoff game to air exclusively on a streaming service delivered a linear-sized audience, according to NBC.
Saturday’s Dolphins-Chiefs AFC Wild Card Game averaged 23.0 million viewers across Peacock and the NBC affiliates in Miami and Kansas City, per Nielsen fast-nationals — up 6% from Chargers-Jaguars on NBC last year (21.8 million across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics) and the most-streamed live event ever in the United States. In an unusual, perhaps even unprecedented move, NBC announced the numbers on-air during the Rams-Lions playoff game Sunday night.
To put the number in perspective, the most-watched Thursday Night Football game on Amazon Prime — Seahawks-Cowboys in November — averaged 15.26 million. Peacock’s first NFL exclusive, Bills-Chargers in December, averaged 7.33 million. (As goes without saying, playoff games tend to average larger audiences than those in the regular season.)
According to NBC, the Chiefs’ win drove Internet usage on Saturday to its highest-ever level in the United States and accounted for 30 percent of total traffic during its timeslot.
It was not immediately clear how many viewers the local over-the-air simulcasts contributed to the overall audience. Per NBC, the game averaged a 45.1 rating and whopping 74 share on KSHB in Kansas City and a 14.5/41 on WTVJ in Miami.
Earlier in the day, the Texans’ rout of the Browns averaged 29.0 million across NBC, Telemundo and streaming (including Peacock), the largest audience for a Saturday Wild Card game since Tom Brady’s final game with the Patriots in 2020 (31.42M). That includes a streaming audience of 3.1 million measured by Adobe Analytics.
Considering that Browns-Texans was a far lower-profile matchup than Dolphins-Chiefs, the difference of six million viewers is not trivial. At the same time, the NFL no doubt knew going in that scheduling a playoff game on Peacock meant sacrificing some of its audience.
With that in mind, the fact that viewership surpassed last year’s equivalent window on NBC would seem to make the Peacock playoff experiment an unqualified success for the league and NBC parent company Comcast. It is also further validation of streaming services as a distribution method comparable to, if not quite on par with, basic cable.
There are reasons to curb one’s enthusiasm about the performance — Dolphins-Chiefs would likely have surpassed the 30 million mark in any other circumstance, and Saturday’s audience ranks among the 20 lowest for a playoff game dating back to the 2002-03 season (248 total) — but there is every reason to believe that playoff games on streaming services are here to stay.
It is not immediately clear how much the two exclusive NFL games on Peacock over the past month have driven subscriptions for the four-year-old service. As of Q3 of last year, Peacock had 28 million subscribers.
