Rihanna’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Now Ranked as Most-Viewed Ever
Written by SOURCE on May 3, 2023
February’s Super Bowl LVII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is now officially ranked as the most-watched ever.
USA Today reports that Nielsen revised the game’s viewership numbers, which means Rihanna’s performance has also become the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show on record, with 121 million viewers.
While her show has become the most-viewed, it did draw 103 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. Critics said RiRi’s performance was graphic, and they found fault with everything from her lyrics to choreography, even saying her set was pornographic in nature.
Nielsen’s new numbers brought the Feb. 12 game’s total viewership to 115.1 million. Before that, Super Bowl 49 was the most-viewed game, which saw the New England Patriots face off against the Seattle Seahawks and brought in 114.4 million people in 2015.
Nielsen previously shared that this year’s game garnered 113.06 million in viewership, but said on Monday that it went over the data once again due to an external encoding issue and a firmware upgrade, which added another 2 percent to Super Bowl LVII’s total views.
“There were two separate issues, each of them accounting for an additional one million viewers,” Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports executive vice president and head of strategy and analytics, told Variety.
