NBC Universal edged out Netflix in the viewership wars for its National Football League (NFL) kickoff week games, according to data shared by both companies on Monday.
NBC Universal’s telecast of the first Week 1 match attracted an average audience of 25 million viewers across its broadcast network and streaming platform Peacock. The figure includes accredited ratings data from Nielsen and non-accredited streaming figures from Adobe Analytics, which measures Peacock.
The game was effectively a rematch of the prior season’s Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, which also aired on NBC and Peacock. Viewership of the Week 1 gae peaked at 27.4 million during the first quarter of the game, NBC Universal said.
By comparison, Netflix’s Week 1 game attracted just 18.5 million U.S. viewers with a peak audience of 21.3 million viewers for its much-anticipated game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams in Melbourne, Australia.
The game was a first in two respects: The first time that the NFL has hosted a regular-season game in Australia, and the first time that Netflix has offered a game outside a holiday. The Netflix game continued a trend of streaming platform grabbing up the rights to one-off games during the season for their platforms, with the NFL happy to cash those checks.
But no streamer has been able to top the broadcast networks in viewership, per ratings data reviewed by The Desk. Last year’s Week 1 game from Brazil that streamed on YouTube attracted only 19.7 million viewers around the world (a figured that was revised by 2 million based on an accounting glitch) — far less than NBC’s kickoff game aired one day earlier, which had 28.3 million viewers in the United States alone.
