TV Ratings: NFL Returns in Dominating Form

That the NFL attracted big audiences over its first week of the 2024 season is no surprise — it’s the biggest show on TV, after all. But the league’s opening slate of games in week one (and the first night of week two) are performing at even higher levels than usual.

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The week one slate of over-the-air games on NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC/ESPN averaged 21 million viewers across all platforms, the league said. That’s the highest opening-week average on record, with caveats that Nielsen ratings didn’t include out-of-home viewing before 2020 and widely available streaming options for NFL games have also been around for only a few years.

The Sept. 5 season opener on NBC and Peacock (along with other league and NBCUniversal digital outlets) led the week with 29.2 million cross-platform viewers, 9 percent ahead of last year’s kickoff. The TV-only audience was 24.56 million, with about 4.64 million viewers (16 percent of the total) watching on streaming platforms, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics figures. While the on-air audience for the kickoff game came down a tick from 24.75 million, streaming viewership rose by more than 60 percent year to year.

Fox’s late Sunday afternoon national game — which featured the debut of Tom Brady in the broadcast booth — had 23.93 million on-air viewers. Monday Night Football (20.5 million viewers on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and streaming) and Sunday Night Football (20 million on NBC, 22.8 million with streaming) also cleared 20 million viewer mark.

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The opening week also featured a streaming-exclusive game played from Brazil, in the NFL’s first foray into South America. Peacock (and local broadcast affiliates for the two teams, the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers) averaged 14 million viewers for the game, almost doubling the audience for the streamer’s last regular-season game (7.3 million) in December 2023.

Week two also started well with the debut of Thursday Night Football on Amazon’s Prime Video. The game, a 31-10 win for the Buffalo Bills over the Miami Dolphins, averaged 14.96 million viewers, per Nielsen — making it the third largest TNF audience since Amazon took over the franchise in 2022. It was a shade below last year’s opener (15.06 million viewers) but is well above the 2023 average of 11.83 million viewers.

The league will further expand its media footprint later this season with a pair of Christmas Day games on Netflix .

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