Super Bowl and Academy Awards still make Americans gather ’round the TV despite DVRs and streaming

Some Sunday nights around the television never change, no matter how many streaming devices or extra screens we bring to the living room. Just look at the perennial viewing parties for the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards.

Even as more cord cutters get their TV fixes via computers, tablets and streaming gadgets, and time-shifting fans delay their gratification with their DVRs, there’s still something timeless about those congregations that gather every Super Bowl Sunday and Oscar Sunday to witness the spectacles live on TV.

“These are events in our culture,” said Marc Berman, editor in chief of Programming Insider, a website and newsletter dedicated to all things television and media. “They’ve been around for decades. They’re exciting. They’re live. They’re competitions. And we want to participate, and we want to do it in a group setting. We want to make a party out of it.”

When it comes to such TV parties, there may be none bigger than Sunday’s Super Bowl 50. A new Nielsen survey done by Harris Poll shows a staggering 77 percent of the U.S. population plans to watch Super Bowl 50. No wonder Nielsen has said Super Bowl Sunday has become a bona fide American holiday.

Such a big celebration should come with a big appetite for brews and chips as well as blitzes and touchdowns. According to Nielsen, Americans spent $1.23 billion on beer in the two weeks leading up to last year’s Super Bowl, along with a truly stomach-turning $123 billion on snacks in the same period. (Incidentally, antacids saw $55 million in sales the week after the last Super Bowl, a 4.5 percent bump over the average week in 2015.)

The national celebration for the icons of Hollywood glamour also gets sporty. Academy Award-nominated stars compete against each other for statuettes and bragging rights for best speech and for “winning” the red carpet, and last year, about 11.6 percent of the population tuned in.

Viewers at home root for their favorites, casting their own ballots for Best Picture and other nominees — often in a betting pool — and judge stars’ fashions as if they were refereeing a game — all while knocking back a few Oscar viewing party cocktails and finger foods.

Whether it’s a wardrobe malfunction at halftime or a controversy-generating speech or swan dress, no one wants to be the odd man out at the office water cooler the next day.

“People I think biologically are geared toward wanting to have shared experiences with one another. And TV is one way that people do that today,” said Jon Giegengack, principal and co-founder of HUB Research, which studies how technology affects the way people find, choose and consume TV content.

Giegengack said before television, people gathered around the radio for particular shows. Then came TV.

That communal Sunday TV experience arguably evolved with “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the classic variety program that debuted in 1948.

“The young kids watched it because they wanted to see Elvis or the Beatles. The old folks watched it because they wanted to see the comic stylings of Mitzi Gaynor,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. “But either way, everybody had to watch the whole thing. We all fed from the same cultural trough.”

Thompson said until the advent of cable TV in 1980, TV viewers pretty much just gathered around the one TV show they wanted to watch because it was the only time to watch it, usually only on that one TV in the house. That splintered with cable channels, he said, then splintered even more with the Internet and streaming. Consequently, ratings for most types of programming have gone down percentage-wise to the population.

But when it comes to the heavy-hitters like the Oscars and Super Bowl, streaming and social media only augment the live TV viewing party, with traditional watchers glued to their sets and second-screen viewers darting between their TVs and touchscreens to like and tweet about the on-air commercials, halftime show or on-field action with up-to-the-second Facebook and Twitter posts.

“I see it as kind of a natural evolution, and technology is enabling people to do more of the stuff that they’ve always liked to do when it comes to events like the Super Bowl,” Giegengack said. “That’s really where technology works the best. It’s when it doesn’t necessarily try to create brand new behaviors as much as help people do stuff that they already like to do.”

Even with new ways to watch the Super Bowl, ratings still are going up for the show. The Super Bowl has been available for streaming since 2012’s Super Bowl XLVI. Since then, three of the Super Bowl games have claimed most-watched status, according to Nielsen.

In fact, last year’s Super Bowl XLIX is the most-watched network telecast ever with 114.4 million U.S. viewers. Nielsen’s second-most watched: 2014’s Super Bowl XLVIII, with around 112 million viewers.

The most-watched Academy Awards was in 1998, when “Titanic” had a windfall of Oscars and director James Cameron crowed that he was “king of the world” to 55 million viewers.

Thompson credits the Super Bowl’s ratings domination to several factors. Football and television have been a match made in ratings heaven from the beginning, he said. It’s also a one-game, winner-take-all contest with a date set well in advance to ease planning for all those Super Bowl parties. And it’s as much a live sporting event as it is a mini film festival with all the big-budget commercials.

And the Oscars is the most prestigious honor in all of entertainment, Thompson said. In recent years, an increasing number of movie theaters outside of New York and L.A. have made it a point to run more of the nominated films — feature length and shorts — near the awards date. This means the audience has become better educated about the offerings and more invested in the contest.

And seriously, who can resist the allure of those celebrities on the red carpet, or the hopes of seeing them do something outrageous on a live show?

Nevertheless, ratings-wise it’s still no contest.

“As much as we think we’re a nation obsessed with movies,” Thompson said, “in the end in the pyramid of American pop culture, football is sitting right at the top.”

rguzman@express-news.net

Twitter: @reneguz