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Super Bowl audience smallest since 2009, averaging 103.4 million viewers

The Philadelphia Eagles won their first-ever Super Bowl, but the National Football League finished its postseason 0-11 as its championship game sustained a more than 7% audience decline.

According to data from Nielsen Holdings, NBC (US) averaged 103.4 million viewers with its presentation of Super Bowl LII from 6:31 p.m. to 10:25 p.m. ET, a 41-33 thriller in which the Eagles claimed their first NFL title since 1960 by dethroning the defending champion New England Patriots. That represented a 7.1% drop from the 111.3 million average for FOX (US)'s coverage of New England's 34-28 win over Atlanta last year, as Super Bowl LI is the only to conclude in overtime.

Despite the fall-off, the Feb. 4 match-up from U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, which peaked with 112.3 million watchers in the 10 p.m. quarter-hour during the fourth quarter, ranks as the 10th most-watched telecast in U.S. history — all the rest are Super Bowls, topped by NBC's record 114.4 million for Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, except for the "M*A*S*H" finale on CBS (US) with 106.0 million in 1983, which ranks ninth.

Although Eagles-Patriots will garner the largest audience in U.S. television this year, the viewership marks the smallest average audience for the NFL championship game since Pittsburgh Steelers-Arizona Cardinals drew 98.7 million in during Super Bowl XLIII in 2009. That was the last time a Super Bowl did not exceed the 100 million viewership.

The drop for Super Bowl LII concludes a disappointing season from a viewership perspective for the NFL, which still ranks as the most-watched programming in the evolving media landscape. The 2017 regular season saw the average game telecast decline 9.7% to 14.9 million viewers — following an 8% drop during the 2016 campaign. Additionally, all 10 pre-Super Bowl playoff games decreased from an audience perspective, when compared with last year's postseason.

The Super Bowl fall-off came despite a high-powered, offensive affair, featuring an NFL-record 1,151 yards (displacing a 1950 game between the Los Angeles Rams and New York Yanks) and yielding the second-most points in a Super Bowl, falling one short of the 75 tallied when the San Francisco 49ers topped the San Diego Chargers 49-26 in Super Bowl XXIX in 1995.

Cable network UNIVERSO (US), which held the Spanish-language rights to the game, scored a 48% audience increase to 543,000 viewers, from the 368,000 for Super Bowl XLIX. Sunday's delivery now stands as the network's most-viewed program, excluding soccer, in its history.

NBC said Philadelphia-New England yielded a total audience delivery of 106.0 million across all platforms: NBC, NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app, NBC.com TV Everywhere, UNIVERSO, the En Vivo app, NFL.com, NFL Mobile from Verizon, the Yahoo Sports app and go90 are factored in, according to Fast National data from Nielsen and digital data from Adobe Analytics.

The numbers exclude out-of-home viewers, which will not be available until Feb. 8 from Nielsen. NBCU said the out-of-home tabulation will increase the measured audience by several million people.

From a digital perspective, Super Bowl LII ranks as the most-live-streamed Super Bowl, delivering an average minute audience of 2.02 million viewers, via the NBC Sports app, NBC.com TV Everywhere, En Vivo, NFL.com, NFL Mobile from Verizon, the Yahoo Sports app and go90. The record-setting live stream peaked at 3.1 million concurrent steams.

NBC Sports Digital's live stream of Super Bowl LII, powered by Playmaker Media, ranks as its most-streamed single game to date. Fans consumed 633.7 million live-streaming minutes of Super Bowl Sunday coverage across 6.1 million unique devices, up 185% and 112%, respectively, from NBC's last Super Bowl live stream in February 2015.

The post-game telecast of "This Is Us" played big, averaging 27.0 million viewers, marking NBC's most-watched drama in 13 years, since the "ER" on the night of the "Friends" finale and the most-watched post Super Bowl telecast in six years, since "The Voice" in 2012, and topped the 17.6 million who watched FOX's premiere of "24: Legacy" in the slot last year.

The special episode of "This Is Us," in which it was finally revealed how the Pearson family patriarch dies, now ranks as the most-watched drama on any network in 10 years, since the 2008 post-Super Bowl episode of "House" on FOX.