Super Bowl breaks viewing and ad records, streamed to 2.1 million

NBC announced this week that 2.1 million people watched a live stream of last Sunday’s Super Bowl. This was the first-ever live streaming of the American football championship game, which also drew a record 111.3 million television viewers, up 300,000 from last year.

According to NBC Sports, it was the most-watched television program in U.S. history and the most-watched, single-game sports event ever online. (The NCAA college basketball tournament, aka March Madness, has drawn more online viewers, but it is not a single game.) Advertisers spent a record $250 million on television spots, with 30-second spots selling for $3.5 million.

The live stream also generated revenue. According to an article in Sports Business Daily, NBC “sold out” its online inventory at prices “ranging from mid-six figures to low-seven figures.” With five online advertisers—Anheuser-Busch, General Electric, GM, Relativity Media and Samsung—the stream therefore likely generated between $3 and $6 million.

The game was streamed from NBCSports.com, NFL.com and NFL Mobile from Verizon. The streams did not include simultaneous loading of the television ads, but the hosting Web sites provided a platform to “watch, vote and share” the ads later on demand. Some advertisers exploited multi-screen opportunities.

The online ads for GM’s Chevy brand featured actor Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute on “The Office”). These online-only spots linked to the carmaker’s YouTube channel, which carried the company’s Super Bowl TV ads. Like other advertisers, GM pre-released their Super Bowl ads this year. Chevy separately launched out a Super Bowl-related trivia and polling app for smart phones and tablets.

Coca-Cola set up a Facebook page where viewers could see the “real-time” reactions of the animated polar bears that starred in its TV ads. Taking multi-screen to another level, Kia released its 60-second commercial featuring Brazilian super model Adriana Lima four days before the big game as a teaser trailer on 18,000 movie theatre screens.

Anecdotal evidence for the streaming quality is mixed. Some viewers who posted comments were pleased; others indicated that quality faltered during the first half, improved at the start of the game’s second half and deteriorated during the game’s final minutes. Light Reading’s Jeff Baumgartner gave the show a B grade, suggesting that the groundbreaking stream-cast also “brought out a record-number of whiners.” One font of criticism was StreamingMedia.com, where Tim Siglin wrote of the “Streaming Fail” and pointed to numbers that “don’t look so rosy.”

According to NBC, online traffic consisted of 4.6 million live video streams, which translates into two streams per unique IP address. Some commenters cited those numbers, but it is not entirely clear whether or how that ratio relates to video quality.

For its online metrics, NBC used data from Omniture and mDialog, which count only legal viewers, not illegal streams used internationally. The week before the game, Reuters reported that the U.S. government had shut down 16 websites that hosted unauthorized streams of live sporting events. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady admitted to watching the Super Bowl last year on a pirated stream on his laptop in Costa Rica.

Incidentally, Brady and his team lost on Sunday, 21-17, to the New York Giants.

For more on advertising trends, see the Videonet report, ‘Between television and digital: advanced advertising arrives’, published in December 2011. The report considers the state of advanced advertising across traditional and new platforms, and looks at developments in dynamic and targeted advertising for VOD. You can read the report here.