A small admission up front.
I largely stopped watching the NFL 2-3 years ago for several reasons:
1. Commercial load and resulting delays in the game;
2. Rules that have attempted to make the game safer, which in turn add to
delays to the game for official reviews;
3. General attitudes of many overpaid athletes.
I did not watch any NFL games this season, as the league turned political, but
I broke down and watched part of the Super Bowl Sunday night. it was a very
disappointing experience.
Not the game, but the way I had to watch it, and the poor quality of the
experience.
NBC does not have an agreement with DirecTV Now for carriage of the local
affiliate in this market. So I had the choice of watching the OTA signal via
antenna, or the Internet stream from NBC Sports; DirecTV Now sent me an e-mail
Sunday saying that I could use my authentication credentials to log into NBC
Sports to see the Super Bowl.
So when we attempted to watch the game via antenna we found the signal to be
unusable - we had bad weather Sunday night that reduced the margin of error for
our indoor antenna...
So we tried the Internet stream via NBC Sports. The quality of the compression
was terrible. For low motion scenes we got almost HDTV quality. But for any
fast action the resolution would blur to less than NTSC quality and motion
graphics would break down into blocking artifacts.
Was NBC being throttled by my ISP, or did they decide to limit the peak bit
rates in order to save on the provisioning of the stream? The following article
suggests that about 2.6 million people watched the streaming version.
Regards
Craig
http://www.gainesville.com/zz/news/20180205/nielsen-says-1034-million-watch-super-bowl-7-drop
Nielsen says 103.4 million watch Super Bowl, a 7% drop
Most Popular Our Picks
By The Associated Press
Posted Feb 5, 2018 at 6:16 PM
The Nielsen company said it’s the smallest Super Bowl audience on television
since 2009 despite the underdog Philadelphia Eagles beating the New England
Patriots in a thrilling game that was close from start to finish.
NEW YORK — An estimated 103.4 million people watched the Super Bowl on NBC, a 7
percent drop from last year that indicates that television’s biggest event may
have peaked in popularity.
The Nielsen company said it’s the smallest Super Bowl audience on television
since 2009 despite the underdog Philadelphia Eagles beating the New England
Patriots in a thrilling game that was close from start to finish.
Last year’s Patriots-Falcons game reached 111.3 million viewers. The all-time
Super Bowl record — and record for any television event in the United States —
was the 114.4 million who watched the Patriots against the Seahawks in 2015.
The NFL’s viewership has been down this year, with experts citing factors like
increased injuries, some confusing rules changes and anger at players
protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. Similarly,
fewer people have cable than they did a few years ago, with streaming onto
hand-held devices becoming more popular.
The dip was also telegraphed by a poll conducted last week by Seton Hall
University, which found that 54 percent of Americans were preparing to watch
the game. That’s down from the 68 percent that said the same thing two years
ago, according to the poll, which wasn’t done in 2017. The poll has a margin of
error of 3.8 percentage points.
Despite that prediction, the poll’s director said he thought the game’s quality
would lift the numbers beyond what was actually seen.
“If you turned the game on at any time to say, ‘I wonder what’s going on,’ or a
friend texted you to say you should watch this, you’re going to watch and get
hooked,” said Rick Gentile, director of the poll, also sponsored by the Sharkey
Institute.
NBC said that if you add in people who followed the game online, viewership
increased to 106 million. And Nielsen said it has not yet counted the number of
people who watched the game outside of homes — in a bar, for instance. Some
perspective: despite the decrease, Sunday’s game ranked as the 10th
most-watched television even in U.S. history.
Soothing any hurt for NBC was Kantar Media’s estimate that $414 million was
spent on advertising for the Super Bowl telecast. That’s second only to the
$419 million spent last year, a figure that Kantar said exceeded 2018 only
because last year’s game went into overtime, meaning there was more time to
sell ads.
The network was able to remind millions of people that the Winter Olympics,
which will also be televised by NBC, begin on Thursday.
Justin Timberlake’s halftime show, despite tepid reviews, drew an audience of
106.6 million people, Nielsen said.
NBC’s post-game telecast of “This is Us” was a winning choice. Nielsen said 27
million people stayed for the drama, the most-watched post-game entertainment
show in six years and sharply above the 17.6 million people who watched the
premiere of “24: Legacy” on Fox last year.
And extra kibble is being handed out over at Animal Planet. The cable network’s
annual “Puppy Bowl” of cute animals, shown opposite NBC’s pregame show, reached
3.05 million people. That was the show’s biggest audience in its 14 years of
existence.