Bolshevik75

I don’t think the NFL is “rigged.” I think it’s “managed.” For whatever those terms are worth. For something to be rigged everyone would have to be in on it. Obviously that is impossible and the leaks would be massive. I think it’s more from the top down things are dictated to make things more probable and they go from there. Probability based. But I’m a moron so don’t listen to me.

As per a NBC release, they drew a total audience delivery (counting streaming on Peacock, the NBC Sports app, and NFL digital platforms) average of 26.0 million viewers, the best such number for an opening game since 2015.
LINK

But, see LINK

Digital views are measured however the service wants to measure them:
“How does it work, then, for a streaming service? Well, as Netflix revealed this week, the answer is however the companies want to!”

Netflix , for example, counts 2 minutes of viewing as a “view.”

“But these figures still have so many holes in them. For one, the company doesn’t count multiple users who log in to the same account (meaning the data might suggest that the parents of millennials who borrow their folks’ passwords are actually watching Cheer and The Circle). The data is also misleading because it completely inflates the popularity of, well, everything. No broadcast network could claim to its advertisers that two minutes of intentioned viewing should count toward a show’s popularity, especially since the ad breaks come much further into an episode of analog television.”