Sunday Night Football seals No. 1 spot
STAMFORD — Sunday Night Football has clinched the No. 1 prime-time show ranking for the 2018-19 television season, marking a record eighth straight year that NBC Sports Group’s flagship NFL program has earned the top spot.
Through its 17-week run, Sunday Night Football averaged 19.6 million viewers across TV and digital platforms, according to data released Wednesday by Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. The total comprised a 7 percent increase from the 2017 campaign and helps reverse similarly sized audience drops in the previous two seasons.
“As an anchor of the strongest prime-time lineup in TV, we are extremely proud that Sunday Night Football has extended this historic streak to eight years,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Broadcast, Cable, Sports and News, said in a statement. “This milestone is a testament to the hundreds of hard-working members of the SNF team, who are devoted to putting on a superb show each week.”
SNF’s dominance compares with six straight years, from
2005 to 2011, when American Idol was No. 1. The Cosby Show and All in the Family, respectively, recorded five consecutive-year runs as the top shows in the
1980s and 1970s. Gunsmoke ranked No. 1 from 1957 to 1961.
“On the one hand, this run as
No.1 is great for NBC because it proves they're not ‘dead,’ either in prime time or in sports,” said Daniel Durbin, director of the University of Southern California’s Institute of Sports, Media and Society. “It also demonstrates that, even in a monstrously diffuse marketplace, they can still produce a No. 1-rated program year in and year out. That said, the numbers are nowhere near what they would have been when American TV was largely dominated by three networks.”
Reinforcing its supremacy, SNF claimed the top spot among viewers between ages 18 and 49 and also produced nine of the 10 most-watched prime-time tele
casts between Sept. 6 and Dec. 30, 2018. Last season’s most-popular game, the New England Patriots’ defeat of the Green Bay Packers on Nov. 4, was watched by an average of
23.7 million on TV.
The show’s average TVonly audience of 19.3 million easily surpassed the
14.3 million viewers for the No. 2 show, Fox’s and the NFL Network’s Thursday Night Football.
CBS’ Big Bang Theory ranked as the most popular comedy, with 13.3 million, while the most-popular dramas, HBO’s Game of Thrones and CBS’ NCIS, each garnered 12.1 million.
“NBC can very likely continue to hold first place in annual ratings with SNF,” Durbin said. “The SNF audience does not need to bury all other TV audiences. It simply needs to hold onto first place, and NBC can tout this to advertisers, audiences, and programmers.”
At the same time, SNF’s digital audience grew significantly — driven by its first season of live streaming on smartphone apps. Fans watched a combined
1.2 billion live-streaming minutes, up 80 percent from last year, across NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app and NFL Digital platforms.
Also this week, SNF became the first show to win 10 Sports Emmys in the Outstanding Live Sports Series category. SNF has earned the honor in 10 of the past 11 years.
To help sustain the recent gains, Lazarus has said that NBC Sports wants to see the average elapsed time for NFL games reduced to less than three hours. He said fullgame viewing time now averages slightly more than that amount.
“We talk about how we can help, by creating different patterns with commercial breaks or creating a faster pace as we come in and out of commercials,” Lazarus said in an interview last year. “We do our best to work with the NFL. And they are very cognizant of that and have done a great job over the last few years of modernizing the pace of play.”
NBC Sports’ studio production for its NFL coverage is based at its headquarters at 1 Blachley Road, on Stamford’s east side.