This year’s NFL Super Bowl LX saw the Seattle Seahawks overpower the New England Patriots to score a 29-13 win, and this year’s broadcast host, NBCUniversal, kept viewers close to the action on field with a strong Peacock live stream.
Unlike last year’s Super Bowl that was available to stream for free on Tubi, this year streaming viewers needed to pony up for a Peacock Premium subscription if they wanted to watch the big game on the platform.
Additionally, the football game was available via NBC Sports website and app with authenticated pay TV credentials, on NBC via virtual and traditional pay TV providers, as well as free over-the-air.
Provider Stats Perform continued its annual Super Bowl latency testing from Phenix to measure how close live streams of the football championship on different apps got to on-the-field action, or the lag time behind it – also known as latency.
Per Stats Perform, OTA feeds were still the closest to on-field action of Sunday’s game, with average latency across endpoints of 19 seconds, with 9 seconds difference between the lowest and highest OTA latency measurement. OTA was followed by traditional cable, at 38 seconds lag time.
But when it came to live streams, NBCU’s Peacock was tied for the strongest performer, averaging 48 seconds behind on-field action – ahead of YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV's delivery of the NBC broadcast that each had average latency of 53 seconds, and outpacing DirecTV Stream (averaged 60 seconds behind real-time) and NFL+ (62 seconds latency).
And while YouTube TV was close to Peacock on average lag times, different users on the platform may have experienced wider ranges of latency - as Stats Perform recorded the largest " audience drift" in latency (aka the difference between the lowest and highest latency measurements for different users seen on a given platform) for YouTube TV at a whopping 126 seconds. That compares to audience drift scores of 32 seconds on Peacock and just 3 seconds for Hulu + Live TV, suggesting a more consistent latency experience across users on those platforms.
As for other data points on livestream latency, industry analyst Dan Rayburn also conducted his annual live Super Bowl latency testing of apps and platforms compared to what the OTA broadcast delivered (but as his blog notes, many factors influence latency so his results may not be representative of other users).
Per Rayburn, testing the Peacock app across a variety of device platforms, 2026 Super Bowl latency on NBCU’s streamer averaged a low of 11.9 seconds behind OTA (on a Fire TV device) to a high of 29.6 seconds (on an LG TV) – compared to latency results on the OTA feed from two antennas.
Rayburn’s testing also showed vMVPD YouTube TV delivering a strong stream of the NBC broadcast feed, averaging 28.3 seconds behind OTA. Hulu + Live TV’s lag from OTA averaged 34.2 seconds, followed by DirecTV (52.8 average latency vs OTA), and Sling TV (59.4 seconds behind OTA).
“While it will be a few days before we have detailed viewership numbers, NBC Sports and Peacock executed what I would consider a near-perfect Super Bowl stream,” concluded Rayburn in Sunday's analysis.
And in terms of how fans feel about live streams keeping up with action on the field, Stats Perform surveyed 1,000 NFL fans and found 93% believe being as close to real-time as possible when streaming a live game is important, with 45% rating real-time streaming very or extremely important.
Just over three-quarters of NFL fan streaming viewers reported feeling annoyed when they realize their feed is behind real-time, where 83% say they’re likely to switch platforms immediately if the stream is delayed and 63% would be willing to pay extra for a reduced or no delay.