This is the second year that Super Bowl is available for online streams and the number of online viewers has grown very fast, though these numbers are still far behind the traditional tv viewers numbers. According to a press release by CBS, the online stream of Super Bowl XLVII attracted more than 3 million unique viewers. This is around one million more than 2.1 million unique viewers last year which was reported by NBC. CBS has also said that it is the largest number of visitors the CBS sports site has ever attracted.
Olympics, the largest sporting event, attracted more than 31.5 million viewers for online streams during the very first week. The msot popular events managed to attract around one million users each. However, it would not be appropriate to compare the Olympics with Super Bowl because Olympics is essentially a global competition and most of the events were available only on satellite TV or cable without any direct online streams like Super Bowl.
One thing is very clear and that is the huge offline viewership of Super Bowl. According to estimates of CBS, more than 164 million people watched the game either completely or for some time.
