Super Bowl TV Ratings Impressive but L.A. Figures Are Even Better

If people in Los Angeles are losing interest in the NFL, since there are no teams here, it doesn’t show.

Los Angeles got a Nielsen rating of 43.8 with a 71% share of the audience for Fox’s Super Bowl telecast, which was better than the national numbers of 43.3 and 65.

The 43.3 national rating translates to about 128.9 million viewers, making Sunday’s Super Bowl the fourth most-watched show in television history. The other three are all Super Bowls, including last year’s game between Dallas and Pittsburgh, which ranks No. 1 with nearly 138.5 million viewers.

The highest rating for a Super Bowl is 49.1 for CBS with the 1982 Super Bowl between San Francisco and Cincinnati.

With new rating methods and the emergence of cable TV, that record will probably stand for a long time. But the number of viewers keeps increasing because of population growth and the existence of more television sets.

Fox started the day with a 6.4 rating and 16 share for the All-Time All-Madden Super Bowl team. The rest of the pregame programming, from 11:30-3:26 p.m. PST, averaged 13.1-27. The L.A. numbers for the 11:30-3:26 time slot were 15.3-33.

The national ratings for each half-hour during the game remained remarkably consistent, with the highest half-hour being 44.3 from 5:30-6 p.m. and the lowest half hour being 41.5 from 3:30-4.

Each ratings point represents 1% of the estimated 97 million TV households in the United States. In L.A., each rating point represents 1% of the estimated 5 million TV households.

The share is the percentage of TV sets in actual use at the time.