Ratings score

The year 2024 had the Summer Olympics and a huge election, but football dominated the ratings once again. Here’s a look at TV trends.

MOST-WATCHED PRIME TIME TELECASTS OF 2024 (total U.S. viewers)

Even bigger

Including the international market the 2024 game reached approximately 210 million viewers.

Why watch?

The ads

CBS received about $7 million for each 30-second commercial during the 2024 Super Bowl, up about $500,000 from 2023. There are typically 80 to 90 commercials during the game. This year the price for FOX Corp. is reportedly to be $7 million to more than $8 million depending on the brands. In a report by Variety, Mark Evans, executive vice president of sales at Fox Sports said, “The Super Bowl is the only place where you can aggregate legitimate scale with one commercial. It’s not like any other thing.”

Audience universe

Thanks to technology and TV-connected devices, viewers have more ways to watch programming than ever. Television is still the preferred method, but even that has changed as people are watching more and more shows on time-shifted TV (such as digital recordings) and online.The chart to the right shows Nielsen estimates for the monthly U.S. audience across a spectrum of devices.

Household ownership of devices

Nielsen’s National Television Household Universe for 2023-24 estimated there are 125 million TV homes in the U.S., and 58.7% have a device capable of streaming content to the television set.

Total viewers: Estimated to be 304.5 million (age 2 and up), an increase of 0.9% from 2016.

Sports and drama: 14% of total TV viewing is of sporting events, and most of them are viewed live, whereas more than half of TV drama is recorded and watched later.

How we’re watching

Given the abundance of streamable content, much of which can be watched on demand, streaming has grown to a sizable portion of total TV usage, hitting 43.3% in December, up from 38.4% the year before.