On Thursday Night, the NFL kicked-off the regular season with a game between the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears. This is the second year in a row the two teams had faced each other in the opener, but this one had even more eyes on it. This season’s debut saw an Average Minute Audience (AMA) of 627K viewers — which was up 10% from last year’s NFL Kickoff Game (570K).
While the telecast was broadcast on Thursday night, it was the highest ever streaming audience in the SNF package. Streaming though was still a small portion of the overall audience of 22.7 million viewers, which was up 16% from last year’s opener.
Over the past year, the NFL has made it easy for streamers to watch local nationally televised games. Last season the NFL made it possible to stream locally televised CBS & FOX games, as well as all nationally televised NBC, ESPN, and NFL Network games on their smartphone or tablet for free. The games are available on the NFL App and Verizon-owned properties like Yahoo Sports and AOL.
In February, CBS saw an Average Minute Audience of 2.6 million for Super Bowl LIII. While, as expected, this is much higher than SNF — regular season football is now delivering a similar number of streamers as the Super Bowl did five years ago. In 2014, the Super Bowl saw 528K streamers, jumping to 800K the following year.