The Kansas City Chiefs weren’t the only ones that staged a comeback on Sunday, as Bell Media’s ratings for Super Bowl LVII managed to reverse a downward trend from recent years.

According to preliminary data from Numeris, the TV broadcasts of the game drew an average audience of 8.6 million across CTV, TSN and RDS, a 6% increase compared to last year’s overnight ratings. Overall, 17.6 million unique viewers watched for at least part of the game, a figure that is also up from last year.

Audiences peaked at 11.8 million viewers during Rihanna’s halftime show performance. Last year’s halftime show brought an audience peak of 11.4 million.

This year’s game also broke a trend of sliding TV ratings for the Super Bowl. In both 2022 and 2021, ratings dipped from the year prior. And while Super Bowl LIV in 2020 set a new record with a 9.5 million AMA and 18.7 million unique viewers, that came after four consecutive years of ratings declines, reaching a low of 4.33 million average viewers in 2019.

Though Bell Media does not release exact streaming figures, the company said live streaming viewership grew by 26% compared to last year, setting a new high watermark for TSN and RDS. On social, TSN earned over 3 million engagements and 28 million views for Super Bowl content on TikTok, with 1.6 million impressions on Instagram and 1.1 million impressions on Twitter.

Featured image courtesy Bell Media