Despite glitches, CBS scores big with Super Bowl streaming

Steven Loeb · February 8, 2016 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/4321

The game set record numbers by giving access to more streaming devices than ever before

Silly question, but did you all watch the Super Bowl? Not such a great game, right? It seemed like there was fumble or an interception or a flag being thrown every five minutes. And my prediction for who would win turned out to be completely wrong.

Oh well, at least Peyton Manning got his grand sendoff. I mean, he is retiring, right? There's no way he can think he'd ever go out in a more spectacular fashion than that. So, overall, it was a good event, even if it did give us PuppyMonkeyBaby, which may be the ultimate sign of our downfall as a society. 

More importantly than the game itself, though, was how people were able to watch it. 

While the Super Bowl has been available to watch online for years now (it was live streamed for the first time back in 2011) the game was broadcast to a wider range of devices this year than ever before. For the first time ever, the Super Bowl was available not just online or through an app, but also on set-top boxes like Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, Xbox One and Amazon’s Fire box.

So how did that go? Well, it was a bit of a mixed bag, it seems, but overall it ended up pretty nicely for CBS.

First, the not so great. At the beginning of the game there were numerous glitches reported by many people trying to stream the game on their devices.

The problem seems to have lasted into the first quarter of the game before it was fixed, which is probably too long in this age of more and more people chord-cutting and ditching their televisions.

It also looks like a lot of people were willing to wait for CBS to fix the problem, which the company seems to have blamed on older devices, because the company saw a “record audience” for the game, according to a report out from Re/Code.

Now what kind of records it broke aren't really clear right now. It may have simply beat out the record streaming numbers for a Super Bowl, of 800,000 average viewers per minute, 1.3 million concurrent users and 213 total minutes viewers, which were set last year. 

It seems very unlikely that the Super Bowl would come close to the real record of 1.4 billion viewers, and 62,400,000 minutes viewed, for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. To be fair, the two events are apples and oranges, considering that the World Cup is a month-long event.

Once CBS released the numbers we will know better, but it's say to say that if the point of giving users more access was to bring in more streaming viewers, then that plan worked like gangbusters. 

As always, we like to also check in with Twitter to see what was trending over there.

The biggest moment this year were the halftime show, with Bruno Mars, Beyonce and Coldplay. I dunno, I wasn't really digging it. The weird battle thing going on between Beyonce and Mars reminded me of the video for Beat It (does that make Chris Martin the new Michael Jackson?) and the end turned into a rainbow of colors and children singing about love, and I felt like I was being indoctrinated into a cult.

The other two big moments were when Cam Newton got sacked and the Broncos took a 10-0 lead in the first quarter, and when the game ended.

Of course, Newton and Manning were the most Tweeted about stars, along with MVP Von Miller, and Aqib Talib, who seemed to be responsible for half of the flags that were being thrown all over the field. 

VatorNews reached out to CBS Sport for more information regarding the streaming numbers for the Super Bowl, and we will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: cbspressexpress.com)

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Steven Loeb

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