Fox Sports announced that its broadcast of Super Bowl LVII set an all-time record as the most-watched Super Bowl in history.
The Kansas City Chiefs’ comeback 38-35 win over the Philadelphia Eagles averaged 115.1 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes, and digital streaming services, according to updated figures from Nielsen — topping the previous record of 114.4 million viewers for NBC Sports’ 2015 coverage of the New England Patriots’ win over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX.
Fox previously pegged viewership for February’s game at 113 million viewers. With the updated figure, Fox’s audience rose 2% over the 112.3 million for NBC’s broadcast of Super Bowl LVI last year.
Nielsen is issuing the new record number after addressing irregularities in the encoding that enables Nielsen’s measurement of TV viewing and unspecified issues with out-of-home measurement of Super Bowl LVII.
With the change, the top five most-watched Super Bowl of all time are: Super Bowl LVII (Fox,115.1M); Super Bowl XLIX (NBC, 114.4M); Super Bowl LVII (Fox, 113M); Super Bowl XLVIII (Fox, 112.7M); and Super Bowl 50 (CBS, 111.9M).
Ironically, Michael Mulvihill, Fox’s head of strategy analytics, predicted before the big game that Chiefs-Eagles would set a record — and even correctly called those 115 million viewers.
Fox’s Cowboys-Giants Thanksgiving Day telecast in 2022 was the most-watched regular-season game ever, averaging 42 million viewers, and NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” finished as the No. 1 show in prime time for a record 12th straight season.