MW Super Bowl LX and Bad Bunny draw huge ratings, but fall short of records
By Mike Murphy
Bad Bunny performs during the Super Bowl LX halftime show at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Sunday. The show outdrew the game itself, averaging 128.2 million viewers.
Sunday's telecast of Super Bowl LX, along with Bad Bunny's halftime show, drew blockbuster ratings, but for the first time in five years the NFL's biggest game fell shy of a record audience.
An average of 124.9 million viewers saw the Seattle Seahawks defeat the New England Patriots, 29-13, across Comcast's $(CMCSA)$ NBC, Telemundo, Peacock and other digital platforms, according to Nielsen data released late Tuesday.
That was just shy of last year's record viewership of 127.7 million on Fox when the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs. Still, this year's Super Bowl was the second-most-watched show in U.S. history, NBC said, and second-quarter viewership peaked at an all-time high of 137.8 million. (The game was only 9-0 at halftime, and lacked much excitement until the scoring picked up in the fourth quarter.)
It was the first year-over-year decline in Super Bowl viewership since 2021, when Tom Brady's Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Chiefs, 31-9.
Bad Bunny's 13-minute halftime show outdrew the game itself, averaging 128.2 million viewers, Nielsen reported. That was only good enough for fourth-best ever, behind last year's performance by Kendrick Lamar (133.5 million), 1993's show by Michael Jackson (133.4 million) and 2024's performance by Usher (129.3 million), according to numbers from the Associated Press.
But Bad Bunny's performance, sung in Spanish, resonated with Spanish-speaking viewers. His halftime show drew 4.8 million viewers on Telemundo, making it the most-watched halftime show in Spanish-language broadcast history, NBC said. The game itself was the most-watched Super Bowl ever on a Spanish-language network, averaging 3.3 million viewers.
The NFL scored its highest-rated regular season in 36 years in 2025, and live sports remain the biggest draws for network TV - though streaming services are trying to get a piece of that pie.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, Peacock took a $552 million loss in adjusted earnings, due mainly to the astronomic costs of sports broadcasting rights. In addition to the NFL, Peacock streams NBA games, the Olympics and English Premier League soccer.
Sunday's primetime Winter Olympics telecasts averaged 42 million viewers, NBC said, up 73% from Day 2 of the 2022 Beijing Games. Between the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and the post-game premiere of the new horror/comedy series "The 'Burbs," NBC said Sunday was the best day ever for its Peacock streaming service, though it did not break down detailed viewership numbers.
-Mike Murphy
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February 10, 2026 20:25 ET (01:25 GMT)
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