Fox Corp. continues to outpace its competitors when it comes to delivering a solid, low-latency live-stream performance for the Super Bowl.
According to Nielsen, 127.7 million viewers tuned into Super Bowl LIX, marking the second consecutive record audience for the big game. That figure includes streaming on Tubi, Fox’s free ad-supported streaming service. In fact, Fox declared Super Bowl LIX the most streamed Super Bowl ever, with Tubi viewership delivering a 13.6 million average minute audience and peaking at 15.5 million concurrent streams.
And according to another research company, Phenix, Tubi averaged just 26 seconds from when the action unfolded on the field at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans Sunday to when Tubi viewers actually witnessed it. Virtual pay TV service provider Fubo, meanwhile, endured the worst latency, Phenix added, averaging a lag time of 78 seconds.
Amid the six Super Bowls for which Phenix has measured this lag time dating back to 2019, that’s the second best performance, trailing only the 23.76 seconds of latency timed by the research company for the Fox Sports app during Super Bowl LVII on February 12, 2023.
Certainly, streaming performance is helped by being connected to the direct feed of the media company overseeing the Super Bowl production in a given year. Fox handled production for the big game Sunday and in 2023, for instance, which aided the all-time best performance of the Fox Sports app that year. Last year, the big game was broadcasted by Paramount/CBS, which delivered an industry-best 35.01-second lag on Paramount+, according to Phenix.
Also according to Phenix, Tubi delivered the least “drift” among streaming companies showing the big game live. Drift is the difference between the slowest and the fastest streams delivered by a platform.
“Hats off to a strong Fox video streaming engineering team on delivering the lowest latency experience by a long shot compared to everyone else,” blogged Jed Corenthal, chief marketing and business development officer for Phenix.
Phenix wasn’t the only research outfit measuring the live-streamed Super Bowl action Sunday. Analyst Dan Rayburn, for instance, noted in his own post-gamed analysis “that many variables impact latency, and viewers will get different results depending on their device, ISP, connection type and network issues.” That said, Rayburn’s own testing largely corroborated Phenix’s findings, with Tubi outperforming most virtual MVPDs Sunday. Rayburn also found Fubo to have the worst lag time, followed closely by the popular YouTube TV.
Meanwhile, yet another analyst kicking the tires on Super Bowl lag time Sunday, nScreen Media impresario Colin Dixon compared Tubi’s live stream to the over-the-air broadcast signal delivered by San Francisco Fox affiliate KTVU-TV.
“The Tubi stream was consistently at or slightly ahead of the OTA,” Dixon reported. “The Tubi browser was three or more seconds ahead, while the connected TV app was about a second behind. Even T-Mobile’s network delivered slightly ahead of the OTA broadcast. These delays are very small, and stream viewers had no reason to worry about social media posts calling a play before they had seen it.”
For his part, Rayburn said he was flown out to Tempe, Ariz. by Fox last year to see the company’s media center.
“The Fox media team is one of the most experienced in the industry in streaming large-scale live events,” he wrote. Rayburn also described an extensive pre-game testing procedure Fox uses to simulate a a live-streaming environment in which its platform is handling 100 million “requests per second.”
Particularly with sports programming, latency matters, especially with viewers increasingly consuming social media amid growing second-screen proclivities, not to mention the rapid emergence of sports betting. You don’t want to be the viewer who finds out about the winning field goal after it’s already being talked about it on Bluesky.
“According to research from the Sports Business Institute, 87% of sports fans use a second screen while watching a live sports broadcast, with some even triple-screening or more,” Corenthal added. “Further, according to Adtaxi, seven in 10 Super Bowl viewers engaged with secondary media platforms beyond their primary source. Only 31% of respondents utilized one content source.”
Article updated with average minute audience and peak concurrent stream figures for Tubi.