by 
Last updated on February 12th, 2022
This year’s Super Bowl was definitely a memorable one for the halftime show (Beyonce), the “night the lights went out in Louisiana” (the power failure), and, I suppose, the game itself.
From a technology point of view, observations about this year’s game:
- Twitter usage during this year’s Super Bowl hit an all-time high, with 24.1 million tweets sent. Beyonce, several aspects of the game, and the blackout dominated Twitter-talk.
- Meanwhile, Twitter has come to dominate “second screen” usage during the Super Bowl (“second screen” referring to the usage of tablets or smartphones while watching TV), according to the Marketing Land marketing blog. The blog cites that the vast majority of advertisers referred to Twitter hashtags during the game, while Facebook only got a few mentions. Meanwhile, Google+ was completely shut out.
- Viewers still prefer watching the big game on their TV sets, as according to The Next Web, only 3% of (I assume US) Internet traffic was taken up by CBS’ streaming feed of the game. Meanwhile, Internet traffic in the US dipped 15% below normal during the game itself.
- Mashable notes
this is the ad(update: dead link) Blackberry should’ve aired during the Super Bowl instead of that “weird stuff happens to some guy using the new Blackberry phone” ad they did air. Of course, they’d want to Americanize the pronunciations in the voiceover (“Zee-10” instead of “Zed-10”)… - Speaking of commercials, the tech-related ad I enjoyed the most was the Samsung ad with Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd. The worst ad, as usual, was GoDaddy (which I won’t be linking to) and its usual awful ad-du-jour.
And that wraps up this year’s Super Bowl. I’ll assume we’ll be seeing more of the same as above for next year’s game.
On another note, I’d like to state CBS’ telecast of this game was somewhat more pleasant than NBC’s, especially in not rushing to cut away at the end to promote some awful reality show like NBC did last year. (The post-game show this year was “Elementary”.) Some of that might stem from CBS’ fairly old-fashioned nature compared to the other broadcast networks—some of their sports anchors’ blazers still sport on the front the “CBS Sports” logo. Such fashions have long since fallen out of disuse by other networks. Of course, Fox will be airing next year’s Super Bowl, so “old-fashioned” (among other things) will be out the window…
(Updated 2/12/22)
“Front Side of Six Vince Lombardi Trophies” by daveynin is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (Flickr / cropped from original)
