The Super Bowl had an average of 123.4million viewers, the most watched telecast in history, CBS Sports announced Monday night.
The previous record belonged to last year’s Super Bowl, which drew 115.1million average viewers.
The Kansas City Chiefs, flanked by support from Taylor Swift for her tight-end boyfriend Travis Kelce, defeated the San Francisco 49ers 25-22 in overtime to win the Super Bowl.
Only the Apollo 11 Moon landing was watched by more people in history, with an estimated average of between 125-150million viewing the 1969 event live between multiple networks.
On CBS itself, 120million people watched the game, the largest audience in history for a single network.
Kelce and Swift were the center of attention for most of the season, leading to record ratings
Kelce helped the Chiefs win the Super Bowl over the 49ers in the most-watched telecast ever
The rest of the top-10 most-watched events of all-time are all Super Bowls, dating back to 2011.
The Super Bowl was up seven percent in viewership from last year. Final Nielsen data will be available tomorrow, per release.
More than 202million viewers watched at least part of the Super Bowl across all networks and streams that were broadcasting the game. The game’s total audience was up 10 percent (183.6million) from last year.
Univision averaged more than 2.2million viewers, the highest for a Super Bowl for a Spanish-language network.
Paramount+, CBS’ streaming service, also had a record-setting audience for the Super Bowl.
More than 200 million watched the Super Bowl for at least part of the championship game
The game saw Kelce win his third Super Bowl with Swift cheering him on in the stands after racing back to Vegas from Japan, where she had played four straight shows on her Eras Tour in Tokyo.
The Chiefs trailed 10-3 at halftime, with Kelce only catching one pass for one yard after the game’s first two quarters.
In the second half, Kelce showed his dominance to finish the game with nine catches for 93 yards.
Speaking after the game, Kelce said: ‘I’m going to go ahead and enjoy this and everything that just happened.
‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I´ve been able to go through three times now. It gets sweeter and sweeter every time.
‘You know the goal has always been to get three. But we couldn´t get here without getting that two, and having that target on our back all year.’
Patrick Mahomes was named the Super Bowl’s MVP for a third time after beating the 49ers
The Chiefs repeated as Super Bowl champions, as they defeated the Eagles in last year’s championship game, the previous record-holder for the largest audience from a single telecast.