Upon Closer Review...Nielsen Admits Counting Error

There’s a new leader for the most-watched Super Bowl of all time — at least according to Fox Sports.

On Tuesday, the network said Super Bowl LVII that aired on Feb. 12, drew an average audience of 115.1 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes and digital streaming, according to updated numbers from Nielsen Media Research.

That’s 2.1 million more than the 113 million viewers initially reported after the game, making it the most-watched Super Bowl of all time, topping the 114.4 million viewers who watched New England dramatically win Super Bowl XLIX on NBC in 2015. (The average audience has long been used to determine the most-watched game as opposed to the peak audience.)

The new viewership mark also puts Kansas City’s 38-35 comeback win over Philadelphia up two percent over the Rams’ victory over the Bengals in 2022 (112.3 million viewers).

It also means Super Bowl LVII is the most-watched program in American TV history.

What happened?

Without getting into the mind-boggling complexities of how TV viewership is measured, Nielsen mistakenly attributed more than a million viewers to an internal (non-public) NFL Network live feed of the game that should have been encoded as Fox viewers. During its internal probe of that issue, which the NFL itself requested, Nielsen discovered an out-of-home (OOH) viewership error that subsequently added another million viewers to the final total. OOH, like traditional at-home viewing, is measured by audio signals embedded in every broadcast that Nielsen equipment registers.

Like with the NFL Network, some of the Super Bowl OOH audience was mistakenly categorized, said Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ executive vice president, head of strategy and analytics. Hence, a chunk of OOH audience wasn’t reflected in the initial viewership totals publicized the day after the broadcast. Nielsen alerted Fox and the NFL once it realized a mistake occurred.

“That they discovered it completely on their own. They proactively brought it to our attention, completely owned the error,” Mulvihill said.