This year’s Super Bowl LVII was the most-streamed Super Bowl yet, hitting an average of 7 million streams across the services showing the game. According to data Fox Sports obtained from Adobe Analytics, Super Bowl streams increased 18 percent from last year’s 6 million streams — and 103 percent over 2020, which saw just 3.4 million streams.
The 7 million streams included viewers watching the big game on NFL’s TV and mobile apps, NFL’s website, the NFL Plus streaming service, as well as on Fox’s apps and website. This data doesn’t account for co-viewing, or when multiple people watch a stream on the same device, and still represents a small fraction of the 113 million average viewers the game raked in on traditional TV.
In addition to Fox and NFL Plus, several other paid services with the Fox Sports channel streamed the Super Bowl LVII, including Fubo TV, YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, and DirecTV Stream. Phenix, a platform for real-time video streaming, tracked the latency across all of these services and found that FuboTV suffered from the worst lag (compared to the on-field action) at 76.73 seconds behind the game. Meanwhile, Fox Sports came out on top with 23.76 seconds of lag, followed by YouTube TV at a distant 54.14.
As more people ditch cable, the number of people streaming the game will likely only increase in the coming years. I, for one, don’t have cable and watched the game on Fox Sports through my Xfinity Flex box. However, I quickly learned that the technology powering the livestreams still needs a lot of work. The quality of the stream wasn’t up to par with what you’d see on cable and almost buffered too much to watch. I may reconsider streaming the game next year — or at least see if I can catch the game at a friend’s house with cable.
