CBS announced today that Super Bowl LV between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs set a new streaming record. The company saw on average 5.7 million viewers per minute of their streaming broadcast of the Bucs 31-9 win — up 65% year-over-year. Overall, the telecast saw 96.4 million viewers across TV and digital, which was down from the 102.1 million last year.
The Super Bowl LV live streaming audience includes the audience across CBSSports.com, the CBS Sports app, CBS All-Access, NFL digital properties including the NFL app, the NFL Fantasy mobile app, NFL.com, the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Bucs mobile properties and Verizon Media mobile properties, including the Yahoo Sports mobile app
CBS says that Super Bowl Sunday delivered a record-breaking day on CBS All Access in terms of new subscriber sign-ups, unique devices, streams and time spent.
2019 was the first to allow streaming of the Super Bowl without authentication on streaming players like Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV. Prior to 2019’s game, you needed TV Everywhere credentials to stream the game from connected devices.
While the game wasn’t available in 4K like last year, CBS Sports was able to cut the latency – the delay of the stream – to near real-time.
Mobile customers were also able to stream the game for free via the CBS Sports App, Yahoo Sports, NFL App (as well as their Live TV Streaming Service. In 2018, NBC offered the stream on desktop and using the NBC Sports App for Tablets, but did not have the mobile streaming rights which were only available to Verizon customers via the NFL Mobile App.
Super Bowl Streaming Audience Since 2012
In 2012, NBC became the first broadcaster to stream the Super Bowl for free, which drew 346K average viewers per minute.
The game has seen consistent growth since with 508K viewers in 2013, 528K in 2014, 800K in 2015, 1.4m in 2016, 1.7m in 2017, 2 million in 2018, and 2.6 million in 2019, and 3.4 million in 2020.
