New York (AFP)

The Super Bowl, the NFL professional football league final and TV event of the year in the United States, was seen Sunday by 96.4 million viewers, the lowest since 2007, even though streaming audiences broke records.

In an increasingly fragmented television landscape, the Super Bowl remains the only program still likely to bring the whole country together.

In 2020, the runner-up, another American football game, reached just 43 million viewers, compared to 102.3 million for last year's Super Bowl.

The first non-sporting program, the game show "The Masked Singer", had contented with 27 million people.

But if, this year, the Super Bowl poster was ideal, with the quarterback duel between Tom Brady (Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City Chiefs), the match, broadcast by CBS, was almost at one way, the Buccaneers quickly taking the advantage not to let go.

The inability to get together, due to the pandemic, could also have weighed down the audience, the Super Bowl traditionally being a festive event, which we watch with several, family or friends.

The 55th Super Bowl was nonetheless a streaming success, becoming the most-viewed NFL game online, averaging 5.7 million people, up 65% from last year, according to a statement from CBS, a subsidiary of the ViacomCBS media group.

The NFL had chosen a multi-channel streaming approach, letting several platforms broadcast the game simultaneously, on the various sites and applications of CBS but also the applications Yahoo Sports, Verizon Media or those of the Chiefs and Buccaneers.

According to several American media, the CBS All Access platform, flagship of the ViacomCBS group in the online video, experienced technical difficulties at the start of the broadcast, before everything was back to normal.

As viewers move in droves on the internet and move away from traditional television, technical reliability is becoming a major issue, especially for live broadcasts.

The successor to CBS All Access, Paramount +, is due to launch on March 4, with an expanded offering to be able to compete in an already very dense market.

© 2021 AFP