The Super Bowl is the most-watched sporting event in the United States, and this year’s Big Game was no exception with more than one in every four homes tuning into Super Bowl LVII to watch the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on FOX. Numbers provided by the data and measurement company Samba suggest that yesterday’s game was watched by more than 36.7 million households, making it the most-watched Super Bowl since 2020.

These preliminary numbers mean that this year’s game surpassed 2022’s viewership totals by nearly half a percent. The halftime show, led by Rihanna’s international star power, was viewed by 28.5 million people (compared to 28.7 million viewers for the 2022 halftime show which featured Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar), with more than 1 million televisions tuning in specifically to catch the music and style icon’s set.

Chief’s fans in Kansas City led the way in viewership by surpassing the national average by 20%, making this region the highest over-indexing market in terms of U.S. viewership according to Samba. Eagles fans were not far behind, with Philly over-indexing the national average by 15%.

Samba’s data is derived from 25 million connected TVs in the U.S. including both linear TV and streaming consumption, but does not include mobile usage or other out-of-home viewing options. Nielsen is planning to release its official ratings for the Super Bowl on Monday afternoon, but the data could be delayed until Tuesday, which has happened occasionally throughout the years.

While much of the attention on Super Bowl Sunday is focused on the game, it is also a blockbuster night for advertising, with Super Bowl commercials often being just as much of a reason to tune in as the on-field action itself. The winner of this year’s Super Bowl ads race looks to be the emotional Farmer’s Dog spot, which was viewed by 28 million homes.

Of the commercial, Samba TV Founder and CEO Ashwin Navin said that it was “60 seconds of pure joy taking millions of football fans along for a tear-filled journey.”

But while this year’s viewership numbers are slightly higher than last year, this increase is not keeping up with the increased advertising prices. According to Navin, advertising prices for the Super Bowl are not aligning with the linear TV viewership.

“As we are seeing with almost all of linear television today, while the price of advertising continues to increase — in the case of the Super Bowl by nearly ten percent per ad since last year alone,” he said. “Audience reach is not keeping up as this year’s slight year-over-year viewership increase demonstrates.”

The issue of linear TV declining and not keeping up with advertising spending is not unique to the Super Bowl. Samba's U.S. State of Viewership report, which was also released on Monday, suggests that the majority of homes did not watch linear TV on a daily basis in 2022, and 52% of U.S. households don’t have cable.

Despite the fact people are turning away from traditional methods of watching TV, it is clear that major events — especially live sports — can still draw people to their televisions. The only difference now is that they have a wide variety of streaming options to turn to in order to get the content that they want to see.