Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast on CTV, CTV2 and TSN attracted an average audience of 4.33 million viewers in Canada, making it the most-watched sports broadcast since last year’s Super Bowl and the most-watched broadcast for the 2019 broadcast year to-date, according to Bell Media.

That’s down from 4.45 million viewers last year and 4.47 million viewers in 2017, marking a 41 per per cent drop in viewership from the 7.32 million Canadians who watched in 2016 – the last Super Bowl broadcast prior to the CRTC simsub ruling allowing U.S. ads to air during the game in Canada.

Including the French-language broadcast on RDS, which drew 983,000 viewers, across all Bell Media channels, 5.3 million Canadians overall watched Super Bowl LIII.

Once the CBS feed of the game ended after the final whistle, Bell says a special post-game edition of SC WITH Jay and Dan, which aired on CTV and TSN, earned the show’s largest audience ever, averaging 810,000 viewers.

CBS says 98.2 million Americans watched the Super Bowl this year, its smallest television audience since 2008.

The numbers mark a five per cent drop from last year, when 103.4 million people watched the Super Bowl on NBC, and a 12 percent drop from 2017, when 111.3 million people watched it on the Fox network.

A record was set for digital viewership this year. According to CBS, 2.6 million people streamed the Super Bowl, for a total audience of 100.7 million.