Peacock’s wild-card broadcast drew 23 million viewers, becoming most-streamed NFL game ever

For all the fret and frustration over NBC exclusively broadcasting Saturday night’s wild-card battle on its streaming service Peacock, an average of 23 million viewers tuned in to watch the frozen clash between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins, making it the most-streamed game in NFL history.

Prior to Saturday, the most-streamed game came in late November, when the Dallas Cowboys defeated the Seattle Seahawks on “Thursday Night Football” in front of an average of 15.26 million viewers on Prime Video.

Saturday’s viewership spike came as fans outside of Kansas City and Miami were required to pay a subscription fee to watch Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs take down Tua Tagovailoa and the Dolphins. Kansas City’s 26-7 victory marked the first playoff matchup in league history to air exclusively on a streaming network.

Peacock’s “Premium” subscription costs $5.99 per month and includes live sports. Last week, the service reportedly had 30 million subscribers, as Comcast previously said subscriptions were up 75 percent over last year.

Peacock previously had an exclusive broadcast for a regular-season game between the Los Angeles Chargers and Buffalo Bills on Dec. 23. That game averaged 7.3 million viewers, peaking at 8.4 million in the fourth quarter. For comparison, Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” broadcast averaged 11.86 million viewers in 2022, which was up 24 percent from 2021 (9.58 million), according to The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch.

A streaming success

Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, who also oversees sports on Peacock, told The Athletic last week that he would judge the Chiefs-Dolphins game first on the quality of the production and then if the technological distribution was smooth and clear. The next goals included metrics such as how many subs the game drove, how many new subscribers they had, whether they met their internal traffic goals and how advertising partners felt afterward.

Viewership goals were not something Peacock executives pushed externally because ultimately the $110 million they paid the NFL for the game was done for subscription acquisition. There’s no doubt the one thing parent company Comcast wanted to avoid was a viewership disaster and it got the opposite. The 23 million viewership average tops last year’s least-watched playoff game (Chargers-Jaguars, which averaged 20.61 million viewers on NBC) by a couple of million viewers.

Both the league and Peacock will be overjoyed by this viewership number. What does it mean? That we are near-certain to have an exclusive live-streamed NFL playoff game repeated next year. — Richard Deitsch, senior sports media writer

Required reading

(Photo: Denny Medley / USA Today)