China deal puts Super Bowl TV availability back over 1B

Next month's Super Bowl can be viewed on TV by more than 1 billion people globally, a sharp rise from the 800 million the league touted last year.

A pact with China Central Television (CCTV), announced over the holidays, added 300 million potential viewers and pushed the league well over the billion mark. Previous but expired pacts with China TV stations had pushed potential Super Bowl viewership over the 1 billion mark before, though the league could not immediately say in which years that had occurred.

Many press reports have frequently, and erroneously, used the global figures as the total number of viewers for the game. True viewership is all but impossible to determine, though. How many of the 300 million Chinese will actually watch the Super Bowl, for example, is entirely murky, particularly given the broadcast will begin in China on a Monday morning.

"There isn't a worldwide Nielsen; we wish there was," said Brian McCarthy, a league spokesman.

An MLB spokeswoman said the league used to say that 100 million people watched the World Series outside of the United States but now considers the figure unreliable and is looking to find another way to estimate global audience.

The NBA goes in the opposite direction and last year hyped its All-Star Game by saying the contest would reach potentially 3.1 billion people. It arrived at that figure in part by combining the viewership range of its worldwide TV partners with Internet exposure.

This year's Super Bowl is in Houston on Feb. 1.