Fox’s telecast of Super Bowl LVII on Sunday night brought in an average 113 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
That makes the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory over the Philadelphia Eagles not only 1% bigger than last year’s Rams-Bengals game, but the third biggest television program of all time. The only telecasts to ever score a larger audience have been two other Super Bowls: the 2015 Patriots-Seahawks game (114.4 million) and the 2017 Patriots-Falcons game (113.7 million).
Fox reported this figure, as well as a 40.0 household rating, based on Nielsen’s time zone-adjusted fast national measurements. This includes viewership across Fox, Fox Deportes and digital Fox and NFL properties. Fox also says that this was the most watched Super Bowl ever in terms of digital viewership, totaling 7 million streams.
These statistics are an average of how many viewers were tuned in at any given moment during the game, but the number of viewers who watched any part of the telecast is 183 million.
The Super Bowl took place at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. and kicked off at 3:30 p.m. PT/6:30 p.m. ET. Along with the game itself, the telecast included a highly anticipated halftime show by Rihanna, the global pop star who hasn’t released an album or performed a full set in six years. (PvNew confirmed after the show that her gestures at her belly were, in fact, a pregnancy reveal.) Fox reported that Rihanna’s performance, excluding the rest of the telecast, reached an average 119 million viewers.
Additionally, Fox aired a host of big-budget and conversation-starting ad spots such as T-Mobile’s “Grease” homage featuring John Travolta, Zach Braff and Donald Faison, and Tubi’s “Interface Interruption” ad that made it look like viewers’ TVs were changing channels away from the game.
Following the Chiefs’ win, Gordon Ramsay’s “Next Level Chef” enjoyed solid post-Super Bowl viewership, landing what Fox says was the most-watched cooking show telecast of all time. Slotted immediately after the game, the Season 2 premiere was viewed by 15.7 million people and scored a 4.9 rating among adults 18-49, per Nielsen’s finalized measurement. That’s a 204% improvement on its series launch in January 2022, following a late afternoon NFL game, which reached 5.1 million viewers and was Fox’s No. 3 unscripted debut of all time, as well as a 115% improvement on its Season 1 average of 7.2 multiplatform viewers.
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