The opening round of the NFL playoffs featured several down-to-the-wire games — which brought in big audiences, including a couple of record-setting ones.
Prime Video’s telecast of the Chicago Bears’ comeback victory over the Green Bay Packers averaged 31.61 million viewers, the largest audience to date for a streaming-exclusive NFL game. The previous record — which stood for all of 16 days — was 27.52 million for Netflix’s Christmas telecast of a game between the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings.
The Bears-Packers game was (obviously) also an all-time high for the NFL on Prime Video. It was up by 43 percent from the 22.07 million viewers for the Amazon-owned streamer’s wild card game last year, though the latter figure doesn’t include Nielsen’s big data component.
Fox Sports had the biggest game of the weekend with 41 million viewers tuning into its Sunday late afternoon contest that saw the San Francisco 49ers defeat the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. It was Fox’s biggest wild card round audience since 2015 and the largest on any network since 2022 (41.5 million on CBS and Nickelodeon). Fox’s Saturday afternoon game between the Los Angeles Rams and Carolina Panthers drew just under 28 million viewers, the biggest tune-in for that window since 2011 (with the caveat that Nielsen has made several measurement changes in the years since).
CBS also set a record, scoring the largest audience ever for the 1 p.m. ET Sunday spot in the wild card round. It averaged 32.71 million viewers, up 5 percent year to year, for the Buffalo Bills’ three-point win over the Jacksonville Jaguars.
The Sunday night game between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Chargers drew 28.9 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, up about 3 percent from last year’s cross-platform audience and the biggest Sunday primetime show since the 2025 Super Bowl.
The five games on Saturday and Sunday averaged about 32.6 million viewers, including cross-platform totals for the NBC game — way ahead of last year’s average of about about 29 million. Figures for the final wild card contest on ABC and ESPN Monday night will be available later in the week.
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