Cord-cutters are increasingly opting for streaming services over traditional television, but there is still one event that continues to prevail over the air: the Super Bowl.
“The Super Bowl is still one of these kind of amazing things in the US, which leads to massive community,” said Richard Deitsch, a media reporter for The Athletic. “There are not many things, maybe nothing else in fact, where you can get 100 million plus Americans to rally around something.”
Viewership for 2018’s Super Bowl LII was down 7%, but it was still the tenth most-watched program in US television history with an average viewership of 103.4 million, For comparison, CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory” finished last season as the country’s most-watched show with an average of 18.63 million viewers.
The NFL’s regular season viewership went up about 5% in 2018 compared to the previous year, attracting an average of 15.8 million viewers.
“The NFL still is going to want its product on these networks because, until proven otherwise, those are the networks that can still guarantee them the most mass,” Deitsch told Brian Stelter on this week’s “Reliable Sources” podcast. “Because even though we hear these amazing numbers about Netflix and streaming, there are still hundreds of millions of Americans who still at a given time, on a certain time, watch conventional television.”
John Ourand, a media reporter for Sports Business Journal, and Sara Jerde, a digital media reporter for Adweek, joined Stelter along with Deitsch to discuss Super Bowl viewership and more.
Listen to the podcast here:
In 2017, the NFL started streaming “Thursday Night Football” on Amazon. The league also has a deal with CBS to stream their games on CBS All Access — the network’s streaming service — through the 2022 season. New NFL rights deals are approaching in the future, with a “Monday Night Football” deal happening in 2021, and the rest occurring in 2022, Ourand said.
“Amazon gets about 500,000 viewers streaming it, which is a really good number for Amazon, while Fox gets 14 million,” Ourand said. “Nobody in the business thinks that’s going to get any closer over the next three or four years when these deals come up.”
Deitsch attributes the rebound in viewership to “an influx of young quarterbacks” and highly competitive games during the prime time hours.
Ourand said the cold weather could be the reason more people are watching, but he ultimately doesn’t think the ratings bump can be narrowed down to one cause.
“The thing that I like about talking about TV ratings is we can come up with ten different reasons, and all of them are going to end up being true,” he said.
Ourand said there has been more of a focus on the game, and less on “problems systemic with the league,” like CTE, a degenerative brain disease found in athletes with a history of brain trauma.
“This year, the biggest deal is the officials with the NFC championship game and some blown calls,” he said. “They’re sort of on-field problems. And so there’s a much lighter mood and a much more celebratory mood so far this season.”
