All good things must come to an end, even the Super Bowl‘s three-year ratings hot streak.
Super Bowl LX on Sunday averaged 124.9 million viewers across NBC, Telemundo, NBC Sports Digital and NFL+ for the Seattle Seahawks’ decisive victory over the New England Patriots, marking an ever so slight 2.2% decline from last year’s record-breaking total, according to Nielsen Big Data + Panel.
It’s still the second most-watched Super Bowl ever, behind last year’s 127.7M for the Eagles-Chiefs redo. That also puts it among the biggest TV programs of all time, though all Super Bowls still trail the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
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Unfortunately, it also means that NBC can’t lay claim to the biggest Super Bowl of this decade, as it has for the past three, including for its 2015 telecast of the Patriots-Seahawks showdown in Super Bowl XLIX. That game was a nail-biter that drew 114.5M, which helps illustrate just how much the audience for the Super Bowl has continued to expand.
However, Sunday’s telecast topped out at a record-breaking 137.8M viewers in the second quarter, which is the highest viewership peak in U.S. TV history.
Fresh off of his historic Album of the Year win at the Grammys, Bad Bunny mustered 128.2M for his bombastic halftime performance, which featured assists from Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin as well as cameos from Jessica Alba, Pedro Pascal, Alix Earle and more. That’s also down just a bit from Kendrick Lamar’s record-setting 133M last year, but Bad Bunny did set a record on Telemundo.
The network averaged 3.3M viewers, marking the most-watched Super Bowl in U.S. Spanish-language history. Telemundo’s audience peaked during the halftime show with an average of 4.8M viewers, making it also the most-watched Super Bowl halftime in Spanish-language history.
NBCU says global viewership for the halftime show will be available next week.
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Also, per NBCU, total social consumption of the halftime show set a record with 4B views in the first 24 hours, up 134% year-over-year. More than 55% of all NFL social views came from international markets.
For context, Turning Point USA’s alternative “All-American Halftime Show” with Kid Rock, reportedly had about 6.1M concurrent streams on YouTube. Of course, there’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, since YouTube streams are not the same as viewers, but it’s still safe to say it was a fraction of the audience.
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NBCU declined to break out the audience that Peacock generated, though it did say that its flagship streamer had hits best day ever both in terms of reach and hours streamed. In 2025, streaming generated 14.5M average viewers throughout the night, with Tubi alone responsible for 13.6M.
This year’s game was poised to break a record, or get pretty close to it, if for no other reason than all of the updates made to Nielsen’s reporting methods in the last year by adding out-of-home viewing and introducing an expanded measurement system through its Big Data + Panel reports. At the start of the season, Nielsen advised there would likely be about a 3% lift in viewing as a result of these efforts.
The Super Bowl LX matchup was an interesting one, providing intriguing reasons for audiences to tune in yet also failing to position itself as must-see TV (beyond the typical cultural cache of the Super Bowl). It was simultaneously a reprieve from the repetitiveness of the past several Super Bowl meetings, and yet it was still a familiar face-off — and one viewers seemingly cared a bit less about than those in recent years.
The Seahawks and the Patriots last met in the NFL title game in 2015, when the Patriots emerged victorious. But, the New England team that took the field at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday, led by coach Mike Vrabel, is not the easy-to-hate Bill Belichick-led machine that won six rings throughout the 2000s. Vrabel, who played under Belichick, has charmed football fans with his laid back, brotherly love approach that seems to have ushered in a new era for the Patriots — which were last in their division in 2024.
The same could be said for the Seahawks, who took a chance on quarterback Sam Darnold after his disastrous 2018 NFL debut and reaped the rewards all season.