NEW YORK: CBS says last night’s game was the highest rated Super Bowl in history--an average overnight household rating/share of 48.1/71. More to come...
By now, nearly everyone has heard NBC ballyhoo that Super Bowl XLIX was “the most-watched television program in U.S. history and the highest-rated Super Bowl in 30 seasons,” according to “fast national” Nielsen data.
The NFL’s big game was the biggest TV broadcast event since the finale episode of the hit series “M-A-S-H” in 1983.
“During the blackout period we lost about half of our cameras,” said Ken Aagaard, executive vice president of operations, engineering, and production services for CBS Sports. “They all came back when the lights were back.”
The Super Bowl continues to be the biggest event on U.S. television, with more Americans simultaneously watching and consuming processed food than for any other live broadcast.
Vizrt said its broadcast graphics systems were used by Fox Sports for both pre-game and main telecast on-air graphics for the Super Bowl XLVIII game and festivities on Sunday, Feb. 2.
While Fox Sports has exclusive telecast rights this Sunday to Super Bowl XLII, an executive at ESPN is predicting that as much as 80 percent of the several dozen commercials aired during the pre-game, game and post-game shows will be aired in HD, even though a majority of American TV sets have not yet jumped up 1080i or 720p. (Both Fox and ESPN use 720p as their preferred transmission standard).
Lyric soprano Renée Fleming will sing the National Anthem as part of Super Bowl XLVIII pregame festivities at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. on Sunday, Feb. 2, the NFL and Fox announced.
There's nothing ordinary about high-definition production, especially when it's the Super Bowl. The most-watched telecast in the nation, the Super Bowl typically raises the bar for everything associated with it. Even the commercials get national news coverage.