2.1 Million Football Fans Streamed The Super Bowl Legally Says NBC

Federal authorities moved to shut down as many illegal streaming sites as possible ahead of the Super Bowl last weekend. It has become very common over the years for websites to illegally stream the Super Bowl, even Tom Brady did it. The big difference this year is the fans could watch the Super Bowl streaming from NBC legally and according to NBC, several million people did just that.

NBC reports that 2.1 million people tuned into the live Internet stream of Super Bowl XLVI. The statistic for the number of users comes from two companies that measure traffic, including Omniture and mDialog. The number of online viewers is still the tiniest drop in the bucket of overall Super Bowl viewers with an average of 111.3 million watching the game on TV.

NBC notes that the viewership for the streaming game was up significantly from the normal streaming viewership of weekly games that NBC says are watched by an average of 300,000 unique users. NBC was also streaming clips from the game along with commercials and notes that 1.83 million clips and commercials were viewed. The 2.1 million unique users watch the total 4.59 million live video streams. That would seem to indicate that roughly every user that watched had to reload the stream at least once.

[via New York Times]