The NFL set a new record last week with the most-watched Week 1 of the regular season in league history.

According to Joe Reedy of the Associated Press, the NFL’s Week 1 games were watched by an average of 21 million viewers per game, which was the highest viewership ever for a Week 1 slate.

The NFL and Nielsen announced that their combined television and digital ratings for Week 1 were up 12 percent from last year. They also noted that 123 million people watched at least part of one game, which was the most for a Week 1 schedule since 2019.

The most-watched game of Week 1 was the Thursday night season opener between the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens, which was watched by an average of 29.2 million viewers.

That marked NBC’s second-largest viewing audience for a game since 2006, which was the debut season of Sunday Night Football on NBC.

For the first time in over a half-century, the NFL staged a Week 1 game on a Friday with the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers clashing in the first NFL game ever played in Brazil.

That game averaged 14 million viewers, which paled in comparison to Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, and the 1 p.m. ET and 4 p.m. ET games on Sunday, but it was a Peacock-exclusive game outside the Philadelphia and Green Bay markets.

Still, it was heralded as an enormous success since it was the second-most watched live event ever on Peacock behind only last season’s NFL Wild Card Round playoff game between he Chiefs and Miami Dolphins.

The season-opening Monday Night Football game between the San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets averaged only 20.4 million viewers compared to 22.7 million for he Buffalo Bills vs. the Jets last year, but it came with the catch.

Since DirecTV is in the midst of a dispute with Disney, those with DirecTV could not watch the game on ESPN, and those in markets where Disney owns the ABC affiliate could not watch either.

Week 2 of the 2024 NFL schedule will kick off with a big matchup between AFC East rivals in the Bills and Miami Dolphins on Thursday night.

It will also mark the start of the Thursday Night Football slate on Amazon Prime Video, which debuted last season.