I'm not sure this is an anomaly. Professional sports used to be an absolutely huge phenomenon, but viewership is way, way down from it's peak around 2000. As ar

I'm not sure this is an anomaly. Professional sports used to be an absolutely huge phenomenon, but viewership is way, way down from it's peak around 2000. As are music and film award ceremonies. Super Bowl and Oscar watching parties were some of the first major social events after the holidays for a lot of people. With easier access to content and information, it would appear major TV events controlled by the three main broadcast corporations have lost a lot of sway. There's still a lot of people whose social calendar is wrapped around professional sports and other media events, but you just need to look at super bowl viewership numbers to see they have plateaued and declined, particularly when compared to a growing population. Superbowl viewership started at 18 million, hit 90 million in 1994, peaked in 2015 with 114 (true east coast/west coast game) and fell way down to 100 million or less starting in 2018. Correlation isn't causation, but there has been a pretty strong uptick in streaming media, and a similar decline in professional sports viewership, which has traditionally been on broadcast TV. https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/super-bowl-ratings-historical-viewership-chart-cbs-nbc-fox-abc/ https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/super-bowl-ratings-historic...