Fox Sports said it averaged 528,000 viewers per minute for its live stream of Super Bowl XLVIII, a 4% jump over the average audience for last year’s Super Bowl stream and a new record for the most-watched live stream of a single sports event in the U.S. Users spent an average of 47.8 minutes watching the stream, 25% higher than the 38.1 minute average for Super Bowl XLVII. Fox has not yet released figures for its total unique users for the stream or total minutes consumed on the stream, metrics released in prior years by CBS and NBC. The net instead is aiming to place focus on the average minute audience metric also commonly used in television. However, network officials said they were pleased with user reception for its much more simplified approach to Super Bowl streaming. “What we did was a high-quality stream without a lot of bells and whistles and our audience was highly engaged,” said Fox Sports Digital Senior VP Pete Vlastelica. “What we’ve seen is that most people just want to have a live stream they can run full screen, so that was the focus.” Similar to TV viewing patterns for Sunday’s game, the live stream peaked with an audience of 1.1 million concurrent users early in the third quarter, long after the outcome of the game was essentially decided. Fox streamed the game online, a review of which can be seen in today's issue of THE DAILY, and through its dedicated mobile application Fox Sports Go.
