CBS announced today that Super Bowl LIII between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams set a new streaming record. The company saw on average 2.6 million viewers per minute of their streaming broadcast of the Patriots 13-3 win — +31% year-over-year.
The telecast saw 7.5 million unique devices (up 20% from last year) and viewers consumed more than 560 million total minutes of live game coverage (up 19%).
This was a year of firsts for Super Bowl streaming. It was the first time that the broadcast could be streamed for free without cable authentication on streaming players like Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Android TV, and Chromecast. Last year’s Super Bowl was available on connected devices when authenticated with your cable subscription.
Mobile customers were also able to stream the game for free via the CBS Sports, Yahoo Sports, NFL App (as well as their Live TV Streaming Service. Last year, 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.
It was also a single record-day day for CBS All Access who +84% in subscriber sign-ups, +46% in unique viewers, and +76% in time spent on the service.
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 this year.
