It wasn’t just in the U.S. where Super Bowl LVII posted viewership growth over the previous year’s game. Bell Media announced Monday that the Kansas City Chiefs‘ 38-35 win over the Philadelphia Eagles averaged 8.6 million viewers in Canada across CTV (broadcast), TSN (cable), and RDS (French-language cable), a six percent boost from Super Bowl LVI:
Overall, 17.3 million unique Canadian viewers, or 45% of Canada’s population, tuned in to watch some or all of the epic, back-and-forth #SBLVII
— CTV PR (@CTV_PR) February 13, 2023
Here’s more from that release, which also discusses streaming numbers and social media numbers for TSN:
SUPER BOWL LVII ranks as Canada’s most-watched broadcast of the 2022/23 broadcast season to date, and was the #1 program of the day on Sunday, with CTV and TSN becoming the most-watched networks in Canada, respectively.
Combined live streaming viewership of SUPER BOWL LVII grew by 26% compared to last year, with the game attracting the most streams of any SUPER BOWL on record for TSN and RDS.
TSN’s extensive social media content around SUPER BOWL LVII captivated fans throughout the weekend, garnering more than 3 million engagements and 28 million views on TikTok, in addition to more than 1.6 million impressions on Instagram, and 1.1 million impressions on Twitter.
That’s certainly a notable audience. And the year-over-year growth was larger in Canada than in the U.S., where the numbers went from 112.3 million to 113 million (a 0.6 percent jump). In the U.S., Fox also saw record streaming numbers (an average of seven million streams, up 18 percent year over year), despite significant lag for many people.
However, it is worth pointing out that while this Super Bowl’s average U.S. audience was the best since 2017, that wasn’t the case in Canada. In Canada, the all-time record was set by 2020’s Super Bowl LIV, which was also a Chiefs’ victory (over the San Francisco 49ers). That game averaged 9.5 million viewers, helped by the return of simultaneous substitution (simsub) that let Bell put their commercials onto the U.S. broadcasts reaching Canada and thus also count those viewers. That remains in effect, but the overall Canadian viewership numbers haven’t been quite as high since 2020, with 2021’s Super Bowl LV averaging 8.8 million, 2022’s Super Bowl LVI averaging 8.1 million, and this year’s averaging 8.6 million.
[Bell Media; photo from The Arizona Republic, via USA Today Sports]
