Week 1 is in the books. And it was one for the record books.
Via Sports Business Daily, the opening weekend of the 2024 season ended with an average of 21 million viewers on the traditional broadcast networks — NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2.
That number doesn’t include the 14 million who watched the Packers-Eagles streaming-only game on Peacock. The number nearly doubled the last streaming-only regular-season game on NBC, from December 2023.
Excluding the Peacock game — which otherwise would have been dumped into the Sunday afternoon cluster of contests — the total average audience would be the best ever for the NFL.
It comes at a time when audiences continue to fracture and few events can draw millions together to watch a live event. It’s basically the NFL, the Olympics, and periodic televised two-person exchanges that might unexpectedly veer into canine and/or feline cuisine.