Streaming the NFL Super Bowl in 2023, some stats and more.

For the first time in years I was not directly involved in streaming the Super Bowl, which gave me the time and advantage to observe from a distance what was going on.

Caveat: this is not a post about the game, Mahomes, Rihanna, referee decisions or ads, almost.

Overall let's say it went well, kind of like a Silver Medal.

TV Viewing stats from Statista : 113M for the game, couldn't beat 2015.

Who was streaming the Super Bowl in 2023

The Super Bowl LVII live streaming audience includes consumption across:?com; the FOX Sports app;?FOX.com; the FOX NOW app; NFL digital properties including the NFL mobile app, the NFL Fantasy mobile app,?NFL.com, the NFL connected TV app and NFL+ for subscribers.

Internationally NFL Game Pass International OTT and all national rights holders.

List of International rboadcasters here:

Viewing stats (Rihanna beats the game)

In the US:

• Third Most-Watched Television Show All-Time 113M
• Chiefs’ Victory over Eagles Posts Best Super Bowl Audience Since 2017
• Most-Streamed Super Bowl Ever and Most-Streamed Event in FOX Sports History
• Halftime Show Starring Rihanna Shines Bright Like a Diamond with 118.7 Million

Streaming stats +18%

From FoxSports: Super Bowl LVII was the most-streamed Super Bowl in history, delivering an average of 7 million streams, up +18% over last year (vs. 6 million) and up +103% over FOX’s last Super Bowl stream in 2020 (vs. 3.4 million), according to Adobe Analytics and traditional counting of streaming (which does not take into account co-viewing from connected devices)

FoxSports deeper stats

Thanks to Michael Mulvihill who leads analytics at Fox Sports I was also able to collect the following (twitter) deeper insights.

• The average Super Bowl viewer watched 143 minutes of the game. For a typical FOX regular season game that figure is 88 minutes.
• Super Bowl pregame up +13%, leading into an audience of 100.0 million at the minute of kickoff, the largest Super Bowl kickoff audience ever
• 2023 Live Sports Viewing Through Super Sunday: (FOX - 71.8 billion minutes, CBS - 44.6, NBC - 24.7, ESPN - 24.6, ABC - 15.2)
• 98% of FOX Super Bowl viewers watched on a TV screen as opposed to a phone, tablet or computer, kind of interesting to me that anyone with an internet connection could watch for free from literally anywhere but 98% chose to park in front of a big ol' TV set.
• The 5 hour, 44 minute Super Bowl pregame show averaged 19.8 million viewers, which is +19% better than the 2022 Academy Awards (16.6m)
• Chiefs victory parade earned a 36.8 rating and a 90 share in Kansas City across four network affiliates and NFL Network.?
• Cord cutting is accelerating. "Linear" TV is down 31% since 2015, and 74% among teens and younger. NFL crashed 2015 - 2018, triggering an "RIP NFL" cycle. Since '18, NFL is up while traditional TV is way down.

Latency (the big debate)

I, myself, understand quite well I guess the latency issue in streaming but I do not have the religious fervor on the matter as many seem to have, especially after this Super Bowl. True that the game was decided quite in the last minutes with a 35-35 score so late in the game the show was on, every second counted.

I have seen different approaches and stats for latency this year, depending where you consider time zero to be: the game at the venue or any reference broadcast in traditional ways. I guess measuring latency should be from the live game at venue, so we have a consistent figure under all circumstances, traditional broadcast is not latency = 0.

The Streamable

"The Fox Sports app, which offered the FOX telecast of the Kansas City Chiefs’ 38-35 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles for free, removed nearly the entire delay (or latency) compared to the over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts and streaming feeds that viewers are accustomed to when watching live sports.

The Streamable tested the delay between the feed on OTA vs. a number of streaming services and the Fox Sports app won big time. In comparison to FOX viewed on an OTA antenna, it was only one second behind the live feed. Fox broadcasted both in HD and 4K, and neither feed drifted more than a few seconds behind OTA throughout the game."

PHENIX

Phenix ?most recent?Super Bowl latency study found The FOX Sports mobile app delivered the best results by far, averaging a 23.9 second live streaming delay behind the field of play. Unfortunately, the drift for the Fox mobile app averaged 70 seconds - this measurement is taken from the user with the fastest stream to the user with the slowest.?

Alan Wolk views are always on point, read below.

"This may seem somewhat trivial, but lag time has become a major sticking point in the transition of live sports from broadcast to cable.

For the uninitiated, lag time refers to the amount of time that broadcasts of a game actually lag behind the game itself. In prior years, certain streaming services were, at times, close to two full minutes behind the OTA broadcast.?

This creates a suboptimal user experience—your friends are texting you about a touchdown, while on your screen the teams are still huddling. The net result is to make fans skeptical about watching sports on streaming while creating negative word of mouth about the experience overall.

All of which makes the leagues far less prone to give the rights to their games to companies like Apple and Amazon that have no OTA or even cable outlet to pick up the slack.

And then of course, there’s gambling."

NFL+

NFL+ had quite some detractors at the beginning of the season as the product was new and came as yet another way to watch NFL games. That said NFL+ proved its quality by remaining stable and delivering a great user experience all the way and especially during such a huge event as the SB. It’s hard to say who exactly powers the solution but the one logo visible on the checkout is my friends at Cleeng ( Gilles Domartini , Alexis Ga? ) who I guess provides all the subscription part with their Subscriber Retention Management solution.?Overall I hear they had a good season.

International with DAZN

Meanwhile, NFL Game Pass International will transition to DAZN from next season: "With access to DAZN’s direct-to-consumer platform – including its powerful data-driven technology, global distribution network and marketing capabilities – the NFL will be able to grow and engage new audiences over the next decade, building on its growing international fan community."

So this SuperBowl was the last on the current NFL Game Pass app from what we understood from public media information.

Sameer Pabari Shay Segev

Nick Meacham and Chris Stone from SportsPro have a great podcast episode fully focused on this subject, have a listen:

More stats

Ampere Analysis - Analytics on Super Bowl

In cases like these I always check with Jack Genovese if they something I can learn from their stats.

"Regarding our data: our survey of sports fans shows that 36% of American NFL fans prefer to watch sports via streaming, compared to 44% of the average American sports fan. This is also explained by the fact that NFL fans are older on average than American sports fans: among younger NFL fans, the percentage that wants to watch sports via streaming is almost 50%.

Other data that may be of interest is more related to the international picture. We counted 41 countries where the Super Bowl was available on a paid OTT platform; in 2020 alone, there were 10. This does not even take into account the NFL Game Pass."

BuzzMyVideos - YouTube ranking for NFL teams

My friends Paola Marinone and Bengu Atamer out together this intriguing comparison report about NFL teams on YouTubes with various metrics. Quite stunning how they compare to EU football teams stats, NFL being much lower.

Ok, something about ads...

My favorite one is:

More on ads.

Ok and now Rihanna too.

But also...

New Voices

Really cool to see new voices in the NFL.

What about the future?

And a great article by The Atlantic on why the NFL matters so much for Big tech.

This is?"A guy with a scarf" ?episode No.11 - for February 2023.

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