FOSTER CITY, Calif.—Super Bowl LV saw record streaming numbers (possibly contributing to the game’s lower traditional TV ratings), but the big winner among streamers was Roku, according to Conviva’s “Super Bowl LV Recap,” which covered streaming, social media and advertising data.
According to CBS, 5.7 million people streamed Super Bowl LV on Feb. 7 across all platforms. Conviva drilled its findings down into streaming attempts through TVs, including a breakdown of what streaming services/platforms people used to watch the game. Roku was the far and away leader, nabbing a 41% share of Super Bowl streams. The next closest was Amazon Fire TV, which had 24%, and Apple TV at 12%; no other platform had more than 8%.
With the increase in streaming of the game, Conviva also looked at the quality of all streams. Conviva found that viewers experienced 0.51% of buffering time during the Super Bowl; this is higher than the Q4 2020 average of 0.36%, but “quite good compared to other tentpole live events,” Conviva said.
Picture quality was also lower than the Q4 2020 average—4.59 Mbps bitrate during the game, 6.56 Mbps for Q4—for which Conviva points to the number of mobile devices streaming the game as a likely factor.
One area where Super Bowl streams outperformed was video start time, averaging 3.23 seconds, better than the 4.23 second mark from Q4. However, issues video start failure rates were up, with a reported rate of 2.45% compared to 0.73% for Q4.
Conviva says that a spike at the beginning of the game was the primary reason for many of these delays, with stream normalizing as the stream continued.
Conviva also measured what areas of the country exceeded expected streaming sizes for the Super Bowl. Cleveland and Denver were the largest examples of this, with exceeding the expected size by 183% and 141%, respectively. Tampa Bay and Kansas City, whose teams played in the game, also outperformed expectations by 19% and 16%. Miami-Ft. Lauderdale and Houston underperformed by 24% and 23%, according to Conviva.
For the full Conviva report, visit www.conviva.com.
