Super Bowl 2018 Start Time. TV Schedule & Kickoff. On TV, US fans watched Super Bowl LII play out live nationwide beginning at 6 pm ET on NBC television, with kickoff time set for 6:30 pm ET. (On the Pacific Coast, that was 3:30 pm; Mountain time 4:30 pm; and 5:30 pm Central.)
Up north, CTV covered the game for Canada while fans of American football Down Under tuned into live coverage in Australia on ESPN Australia and One HD. Across the pond, (and five hours ahead of US East Coast time) the live game was seen during the wee hours on BBC and Sky Sports in the UK.
Last year, NBC said it streamed 213 million minutes of coverage and averaged 800,000 people per minute. It also reported a concurrent peak of 1.3 million streamers — I don’t have a concurrent number for this year.
Here are some other numbers that give you a sense of scope:
Nearly four million unique viewers streamed some part of the pre-game, game or post-game coverage, and those viewers watched a total of 402 million minutes.
Those viewers didn’t just dip in, either: Average viewing time was 101 minutes.
That would seem to indicate a dramatic increase in streaming, which is probably true. But! The wrinkle is that this year’s numbers include both the audience that CBS reached, via its CBS Sports site and CBS Sports apps on platforms like Apple TV and Roku, as well as the two apps the NFL operates on its own — an NFL app for Verizon mobile customers and Xbox.
So it’s possible — but not very likely — that the Verizon and Xbox users account for much of the increase over last year’s numbers. I’ve asked CBS and the NFL for comment, but assume they won’t be interested in breaking them out.
If you want to get even more confused, you can try to map these numbers to the ones that Yahoo and the NFL reported last fall, when Yahoo streamed a low-stakes regular season NFL game and reported 15 million viewers. Two big differences: That Yahoo stream went worldwide, and the CBS and NFL numbers I have are for U.S. viewers; more importantly, Yahoo auto-played the game to anyone who visited its home page, as well as other high-traffic properties like Yahoo mail. If you wanted to watch last night’s game, you needed to go to the CBS Sports website or download an app.