On Monday, CBS announced a "record audience" of live-streaming viewers for Super Bowl 50, but didn't reveal the actual numbers behind the mark at the time.
Later in the day, however, the network disclosed the streaming viewership statistics ... and they didn't disappoint. Streaming coverage of Sunday night's big game generated a Super Bowl-high 3.96 million unique viewers across digital platforms including desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones and connected televisions, as reported by CBS.
In total, streaming viewers consumed upwards of 402 million total minutes of coverage, watching for more than 101 minutes each on average. Within the actual game time, viewers streamed more than 315 million minutes of coverage, spelling an average audience of 1.4 million viewers per minute.
CBS made its Super Bowl 50 live stream available on CBSSports.com on PCs and tablets in addition to its CBS Sports app for the iPad and Android and Windows 10 tablets. The game was also streamed on devices such as Apple TV, Roku players, Amazon Fire TV and XBox One via the CBS Sports app.
As strong as CBS' Super Bowl streaming stat of an average of 1.4 million viewers per minute was, it actually was less than Yahoo's average of 1.64 million U.S. viewers for its live-stream regular-season game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars this past October, as reported by AdWeek.com. Pretty incredible that a paltry regular-season game could deliver better average streaming numbers than Super Bowl 50, right?
Away from its live stream, CBS' television broadcast of Super Bowl 50 was the third-most-watched program in TV history with an average of 115.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen Fast National ratings, as reported by CBS.
