TV Ratings Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022 – The Hollywood Reporter
Super Bowl LVI delivered the game’s usual massive audience for NBC Sunday — and rebounded from multiyear lows last year.
The broadcast averaged 99.18 million viewers on NBC and an additional 1.91 million on Telemundo for an over-the-air tally of 101.09 million viewers. Streaming and digital platforms, including Peacock, NBC Sports, and NFL and team properties, pushed the total to 112.3 million viewers.
The 99.18 million viewers for the NBC telecast is an 8 percent improvement over last year’s game, which brought in 91.63 million viewers on CBS. The cross-platform figure is up by even more — 16.5 percent over last year’s 96.4 million across all platforms (which may be an undercount due to Nielsen issues at the time). Super Bowl LV drew the smallest audience for the game since 2007.
The streaming and digital audience of 11.21 million viewers is an all-time high for the Super Bowl, and nearly double the 5.7 million for last year’s game. It accounted for just under 10 percent of the total audience.
Super Bowl LVI is also the most watched single telecast in two years: The 2020 edition of the game — one of the last major sporting events before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic — averaged about 113 million viewers (including those watching away from home) for Fox. Out-of-home viewing is now integrated into Nielsen’s viewer counts.
Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 remains No. 1 in viewers all time with 114.44 million viewers (not including any out-of-home counts).
The Super Bowl caps a season of improved ratings across the board for the NFL. Regular season games were up 7 percent versus the 2020 season, and all three rounds of the playoffs prior to the Super Bowl grew by at least 13 percent. The two conference championship games on Jan. 30 each set multiyear highs.
Following the Super Bowl, NBC transitioned to its Winter Olympics coverage and scored the biggest audience of the games to date, by a wide margin. The network averaged 21.28 million viewers from 10:24 p.m. to midnight ET, nearly doubling the previous high for these Olympics (11.09 million on Feb. 10). An additional 1.21 million people watched on USA starting at 10:45 p.m. ET.
The NBC audience for the Olympics is slightly higher than the 20.4 million who watched the series premiere of The Equalizer after the Super Bowl on CBS last year and in line with the average post-game programs for the previous five years (22.9 million).
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Feb. 15, 8:17 a.m. Corrected viewer figures for Telemundo and the total over-the-air audience.
Feb. 15, 9 a.m. Updated with multiplatform viewing totals.