Ted Sets Peacock Record as Exclusive NFL Wild Card Game Drives Interest in Streaming App

Seth MacFarlane’s Ted prequel series appears to have benefited greatly from Peacock’s well-streamed, exclusive hosting of Saturday night’s NFL Wild Card game between the Chiefs and Dolphins.

NBCUniversal says that Ted launched as Peacock’s most-watched original title ever through its first three days on the platform, after dropping all seven episodes last Thursday. (Note, no specific viewing metrics were offered.)

Ted‘s overstuffed debut comes after Peacock surged to the top of app store popularity ahead of the aforementioned NFL Wild Card game. In fact, as sports biz analyst Joe Pompliano noted over the weekend, Google search volume for the Peacock app swelled to 2x higher than at any other point in the streamer’s three-and-a-half-year history.

As TVLine reported Sunday night, the Dolphins-Chiefs game — with an average audience of approximately 23 million viewers across Peacock, NBC stations in Miami and Kansas City, and on mobile with NFL+ — delivered the most-streamed event ever in the U.S. NBCUniversal reportedly shelled out $110 million for exclusive rights to the contest, which was the first time an NFL playoff game was only available through streaming.

As a result, Peacock as a whole on Saturday enjoyed its largest single day ever in audience usage, engagement and time spent, with a record 16.3 million concurrent devices.

Ted, which earned an average TVLine reader grade of “A,” clearly benefited from the surge in interest in the app/service.

While Ted is being billed as an “event series,” MacFarlane isn’t ruling out a Season 2.

“Anything is possible,” he recently told TVLine. “I would not want to shoehorn the show into a category as far as its sustainability. I think it depends on the response. If there’s an appetite for it, anything is possible.”