The National Football League (NFL) said three football games aired by CBS, Fox and NBC on Thanksgiving Day set a viewership record for the holiday, with 141 million households watching at least a few minutes of football programming last Thursday.
The number was cited in a press release issued by the NFL on Tuesday, which revealed viewership figures for the early afternoon match-up between the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions on CBS for the first time.
Citing Nielsen data, the early game on CBS averaged 37.5 million viewers, setting a record for a football game airing in that time slot on Thanksgiving and up 11 percent from last year’s game on the network.
The data was not made available by CBS late last week, even though rival football broadcasters Fox and NBC released overnight data that showed how many people tuned in to watch football games broadcast on their networks. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, ended its contract with Nielsen in early October; a spokesperson for Paramount declined to say if CBS would release alternate viewership data from VideoAmp or another company when The Desk reached out by email on Monday.
CBS and Paramount have still not released viewership data of their own, leaving the Nielsen figures made public by the NFL to serve as the only comparable metric by which to evaluate viewership on their network and the two others.
Last Friday, Fox said its match-up between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants won the day with an average audience of 38.5 million viewers, while Comcast’s NBC Universal said its prime-time game between the Green Bay Packers and Miami Dolphins averaged 26.6 million viewers. Both figures included viewership on broadcast and cable TV, streaming cable alternatives, and standalone streaming apps like Fox Sports, NBC Sports and Peacock.
