Out-of-Home Count Adds 12M Super Bowl Viewers

Preliminary out-of-home viewing of the Super Bowl as measured by Nielsen adds more than 12 million more viewers to the game’s total.

NBC, which aired the Philadelphia Eagles’ upset win over the New England Patriots, can now claim a total audience delivery of 118.2 million viewers across all platforms, up 12%.

Out-of-home viewership has been measured before, but never within four days of a live event.

“We know that the Super Bowl is watched in large groups by many at parties, on college campuses, and elsewhere, so we are pleased to be able to report a lift that is in the double digits percentage wise to our NBC broadcast,” said Mark Lazarus, chair ofNBC Broadcasting & Sports. “We will continue to utilize ‘out of home’ reporting throughout the Winter Games, as the Olympics is a communal event that brings people together.”

The “out of home” metric for Super Bowl LII was calculated based solely on viewership of the NBC broadcast, which is now seen as having 115.6 million total viewers, up from the 103.4 million Nielsen reported Monday (Feb. 5).

In addition to the broadcast, the total audience figure includes people watching on digital platforms including NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app, NBC.com TV Everywhere, Universo, the En Vivo app, NFL.com, NFL Mobile in Verizon, Yahoo Sports app and go90.

During the Winter Olympics, also on NBC, out-of-home viewing will be measured for every primetime telecast, beginning Thursday (Feb. 8), across all time zones.

Jon Lafayette

Jon has been business editor of Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He focuses on revenue-generating activities, including advertising and distribution, as well as executive intrigue and merger and acquisition activity. Just about any story is fair game, if a dollar sign can make its way into the article. Before B+C, Jon covered the industry for TVWeek, Cable World, Electronic Media, Advertising Age and The New York Post. A native New Yorker, Jon is hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Chicago.