Despite the lopsided score between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, it was the single most watched television program in U.S. history. With 111.5 million viewers, it slightly beat out Super Bowl XLVI between the New york Giants and New England Patriots; and thanks to Fox Sports Go, it was also the most viewed live stream ever for a single sports event.
There were many reasons why so many viewers tuned in this year; Peyton Manning was playing, Richard Sherman had become a hotly debated controversial figure just two weeks prior, big time advertisements with many A-list celebs were leaked via social media prior to the game, Bruno Mars delivered a strong half time performance and it was the first “cold weather” Super Bowl hosted in New York.
With such a large TV viewing audience, social media was not far behind in terms of actively engaged users. Facebook reported 185 million interactions from 50 million users during the Super Bowl and Twitter stats are saying that 25 million tweets were sent during the game.
At the Cellphone Bowl pic.twitter.com/q98gQ1i295
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) February 2, 2014
Overall, every metric of viewership was off the charts for Super Bowl XLVIII and part of its success was reliant upon AT&T wireless networks that were installed at MetLife Stadium to prepare for the Big Game.
In preparation for Super Bowl XLVIII, AT&T built and installed a new Digital Antenna System (DAS) at MetLife Stadium that had more than triple the capacity of the original DAS used by AT&T during the 2013 regular football season. This DAS was equivalent to 21 traditional cell sites and featured more than 500 antennas hidden throughout the stadium bowl and more than 6.4 miles of cable.
On Sunday AT&T’s peak hour of data usage at the Big Game occurred during the hour right before kick-off, from 5 to 6 pm eastern. AT&T customers used 119GB during this 5-6p eastern hour on the in-stadium mobility network, which was 52-percent more than the amount of data that AT&T customers used during the peak hour at last year’s Big Game in New Orleans. Total data usage was 624GB which is equivalent to 1.8. million social media posts with photos. It was the highest volume of data ever carried on the in-stadium mobility network for any one-day sporting event that AT&T has measured. Overall, it was more than a 60-percent increase in total data traffic compared to last year’s Super Bowl.
As seen by the image below, there has been a consistent change of usage patterns shifting from the use of calls to increased data usage over the last 4 years. Since 2011, on AT&T’s in-stadium network at the Big Game total data usage has increased from 177GB to 624GB and peak hour data usage has increased from 30GB to 119GB.
Super Bowl XLVIII was one for the record books in many ways. It featured the fastest score in Super Bowl history (a safety in the first 12 seconds), largest TV and streaming audience, most mobile data usage, most social media interactions, and many more records based on all sorts of metrics.
So be sure and tune in next year with well over 100 million other viewers as all of these records will surely be challenged and most likely broken once again.