The NFL is still the king of live TV. Last year, the king picked up a tiny dent in its crown.
Via Eric Fisher of FrontOfficeSports.com, regular-season viewership dropped by 2.2 percent for the 2024 season.
The average viewership across all networks was 17.5 million per game. In 2023, the number was 17.9 million. That was a seven-percent bump over 2022.
Despite the dip, it’s still far more than any other sport or series or event can muster on a regular basis, if ever.
As to the various broadcast partners, Amazon posted an 11-percent increase for 2024. Fox dropped by three percent. NBC posted a one-percent increase.
ESPN dropped by 14 percent, mainly because most if not all of the 2023 games were simulcast by ABC. (During the 2024 season, ESPN ramped up the number of games that were aired on broadcast TV, too.)
CBS didn’t release full-season numbers. Which means their full-season numbers were nothing to brag about.
Then there’s Netflix, which averaged 24.2 million for a pair of Christmas games. While a huge streaming audience, the number surely would have been higher if the games had been televised on a three-letter network.
