Paramount+ said users streamed 2.64 billion minutes during the Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers. But while a billion anything can’t be ignored, the announcement didn’t offer a clear picture of how the streamer actually did after hosting the big game for the first time.
The only comparison it offered was the 1.48 billion minutes streamed for last year’s Super Bowl. That’s a 78 percent jump, which again on the surface seems good. But Super Bowl LXVII was broadcast by FOX, which doesn’t have a subscription streaming service like Paramount+. Also, consider that this year’s game went into overtime, and lasted a record 74 minutes and 57 seconds (not counting commercials), and the minutes were automatically going to be larger.
A spokeswoman for Paramount said no other numbers were available.
Compare this to when Peacock announced the viewership for its exclusive AFC Wild Card Game. It didn’t mince words, calling it the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history. It averaged 23 million viewers throughout the game on Peacock, the NBC stations in Miami and Kansas City, and NFL+.
Paramount+ was never going to post those numbers, despite heavy promotion of the service as a place for cord cutters to check out the game. The Super Bowl was broadly available not just on CBS, but Nickelodeon, Nick-at-Nite, and Univision in Spanish. Peacock benefited from the exclusivity of the AFC Wild Card Game on Peacock, something that angered at least one lawmaker.
But Paramount+ boasted 63 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter, more than double the 31 million subscribers that Peacock ended the year with. Surely some of those subscribers opted for the streaming feed instead?
The company did say Super Bowl Sunday was Paramount+’s biggest day ever and the biggest live event on the service since its launch in terms of active subscriber households and hours consumed.
But without clearer numbers, there’s no telling how it did. Maybe that’s the point.
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But without any clearer numbers, it’s hard to say how well it did. Maybe that was the point.