For the third-consecutive season, CBS finishes atop the NFL broadcasting ranks, though all networks set multiyear records with a lift from Nielsen\u2019s new Big Data + Panel methodology and expanded out-of-home viewing measurements.<\/p>\n
CBS averaged 21.25 million viewers<\/a> for the 2025 NFL regular season, up 11% versus last year\u2019s figure and topping Fox, its Sunday-afternoon competitor. Fox, for its part, averaged 19.6 million viewers<\/a> for the 2025 NFL regular season, up 6% versus its season-long average for 2024 and its best season since 2015. NBC, the NFL\u2019s primetime partner, averaged 23.5 million viewers for Sunday Night Football, marking the most-watched primetime show<\/a> in America for the 15th consecutive year.<\/p>\n It should be noted, Nielsen measures the streaming audiences for CBS and Fox, while NBC\u2019s streaming audience is measured via Adobe Analytics, making comparison of the above figures apples-to-oranges.<\/p>\n The CBS versus Fox battle was much closer when looking at the 4:25 p.m. ET national window. The late-afternoon timeslot, which is regularly the NFL\u2019s most-watched window, averaged 25.83 million viewers on CBS, barely edging Fox\u2019s 25.3 million viewers.<\/p>\n It is just the third time since 2007 that CBS has finished at the top of the pack. Until the 2023-24 season, Fox\u2019s NFC-heavy package dominated the category, earning the title of most-watched NFL package each year 16 times in a row.<\/p>\n The balance of power has clearly shifted, however. For one, the NFL\u2019s schedule is much more flexible now than it was for Fox\u2019s decade-plus of viewership dominance. Under the new scheduling protocols, Fox gets more AFC games while CBS gets more NFC games, all with the goal of maximizing NFL viewership in the aggregate by distributing the best games to the most markets, regardless of conference or network affiliation. The AFC has also had the star quarterback edge<\/a> in recent years, with Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Lamar Jackson all residing within the conference. And although scheduling is more balanced nowadays, CBS still gets an AFC-skewing package.<\/p>\n As for pregame programs, both Fox and NBC maintained dominance in their respective windows.\u00a0Fox NFL Sunday beat out\u00a0The NFL Today on CBS for the 32nd consecutive season, averaging 4.4 million viewers per episode. NBC\u2019s\u00a0Football Night in America averaged 8.8 million viewers, marking its 20th consecutive year as the most-watched studio show on television.<\/p>\n Of course, all of this breaking of long-held records can at least partially be attributed to Nielsen\u2019s new methodologies, which have generally served to increase live sports viewership as compared to prior years. To be sure, some of it is the NFL\u2019s growing popularity. But with new baselines being set, it\u2019ll be interesting to see if networks can maintain this level of growth over the next several years, when Nielsen\u2019s methodologies will (presumably) be more stable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the third-consecutive season, CBS finishes atop the NFL broadcasting ranks, though all networks set multiyear records with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[49,48,514,26265,47443,166659,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-393596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-nfl-on-cbs","12":"tag-nfl-on-fox","13":"tag-nfl-on-nbc","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}