Saturday’s football game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins wasn’t only a record-breaking game due to frigid temperatures but also for becoming the most streamed event in the history of the United States.
The wild-card game, which saw the Chiefs emerging victorious against the Dolphins with a score of 26-7, was streamed exclusively on the Comcast-owned platform Peacock, and it reached a total of 27.6 million viewers. The average audience for the game was approximately 23.0 million viewers across Peacock, local NBC stations, and the sports platform NFL+, putting it 6% higher than last year’s wild-card game, according to a press release from Comcast.
“We couldn’t be prouder of our partnership with Peacock and are thrilled with the record-breaking numbers from the first-ever exclusively live streamed NFL playoff game,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. “For several years now, we have been consistently expanding the digital distribution of our games and as these results show, the NFL is not only serving our fans who consume our content in a multitude of ways but helping to shape the future of the entire sports and entertainment industry.”
Another record that was set by the game, held on Saturday, included Peacock achieving its largest single day ever in audience usage, with 16.3 million concurrent devices in use to watch the game. The game was also one of the biggest days for the internet worldwide, taking up 30% of the internet’s traffic.
Some of the additional traffic in Peacock’s usage could possibly be attributed to Taylor Swift, a world-famous musician, attending the game. Swift has been dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce for several months now, leading to an increasing interest in the team.
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Ahead of the game, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) had issued a statement online complaining that the game would only be aired on Peacock and asked Goodell and NBC to end the “Peacock bait-and-switch BS.”
“Millions of loyal fans already pay for NBC,” Ryan wrote on social media. “Let us watch the damn game!”
