NFL Playoff Game On Peacock Hits Streaming Record With 23M Viewers
- by Wayne Friedman , January 15, 2024
The first exclusively live NFL playoff game on NBCUniversal’s Peacock on Sunday -- in which the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins 26-7 -- has set the record for best TV viewership ever of a live-streamed event, with 23 million Nielsen-measured viewers.
Adding in local NBC TV stations' coverage in Miami and Kansas City, as well as that on the NFL+ streaming platform, the game averaged 26.3 million viewers -- from preliminary first-party and Nielsen data across all platforms.
NBCU also says that in terms of reach, the game totaled 27.6 million viewers.
All this helped Peacock reach what it says was its largest audience usage, engagement and time spent, with a record 16.3 million concurrent devices.
Local TV station data says the game recorded a 45.1 household rating/74 share on KSHB Kansas City and a 14.5 household rating/41 share on WTVJ Miami.
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Separately, on mostly linear TV networks, NBC says another playoff game featuring the Cleveland Browns vs. the Houston Texans on Saturday averaged 29 million viewers across the NBC Television Network, Peacock, NBC Sports Digital, NFL Digital, and Telemundo.
Earlier this month, Amazon Prime Video -- another major premium streaming platform -- said regular-season NFL “Thursday Night Football” games posted a strong 24% increase in the average viewership per game at 11.86 million -- up from 9.58 million the year before, according to Nielsen.
Maybe it was a record for a streaming platform, but I'd like to be a fly on the wall post-game with the NFL and NBC. The Chiefs / Dolphins game was widely, and wildly, anticipated and if totaly viewership for that game was down, then it echoes the predominantly negative sentiment on social channels.
I didn't read one comment from fans praising NBC or the NFL to force fans to download the app and pay to watch one game. My uneducated guess is the viewership would have been closer to 35 million and I'd also bet almost all of the people who paid to watch the game will not renew their subscription to Peacock.
The NFL is making it harder and harder for people to watch and this experiment with Peacock doesn't seem like it served the fans or advertisers well.
I wonder how the NBC affiliates felt? 27 million station viewers being directed elsewhere.