The NFL common season is lastly again to breathe some life into linear tv.
Audiences have been raring to go for the Thursday night time kickoff sport, delivering an enormous viewers for NBC’s telecast of the Detroit Lions victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. The sport averaged 27.5M viewers to rank because the largest NFL kickoff sport viewers since 2015, up 24% over final yr.
The community adopted it up with one other robust viewers for Sunday night time’s matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants. That Sunday Night Football broadcast drew 21.8M viewers, which is down a number of million from final yr’s viewers of round 24M. Still, it was a profitable opening weekend for NBC, which touted a 7% total raise in viewership throughout its two-game kickoff weekend versus final yr.
The winner of the week, nonetheless, seems to be CBS’ late Sunday afternoon Eagles vs. Patriots matchup, which was up 28% over the identical window final season. The 21.4M viewers delivered the largest Week 1 viewers for the community since 2015.
ABC can also be taking residence a win for its Week 1 Monday Night Football viewers. The Jets vs. Bills introduced in 10M viewers, which is up considerably from the 8M who tuned in for the Week 1 MNF sport final season — although that may even have one thing to do with Aaron Rodgers sustaining a season-ending harm inside minutes of the primary quarter.
That leaves three extra video games — each of Fox’s Sunday matchups, in addition to CBS’ early kickoff. All three drew a lot smaller audiences than Week 1 final yr, although all have been nonetheless above 10M.
Even with some deflated audiences, the networks are absolutely excited to have professional soccer again on their schedules. After a dry summer season filled with reruns, all of the broadcasters are coming into the 2023-24 TV season with out practically any scripted content material because of the ongoing writers and actors strikes, which have simply hit days 134 and 61, respectively. And it’s not like rankings have been wanting that nice earlier than the strikes, both. Declining linear rankings over the previous a number of years have been already pushing networks towards stay sports activities and actuality collection. It looks as if, not less than for now, the NFL will proceed to be a boon for linear TV.
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