Most Streamed Event By State in 2017

By admin, February 12th, 2018

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You are what you stream, right? 2017 has come and gone, and before we get too deep into 2018, let’s look back at the most-streamed events of the year, as revealed by Google Trends. 

Interesting Insights by State

The most-searched streamed events covered a wide range of activities, including the NBA Finals, March Madness, the Super Bowl, the PGA Tournament, NASCAR, the Kentucky Derby, award shows and more. 

Eight states were the most interested in the NBA Finals: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah. And so was the District of Columbia.

Idaho, Missouri, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming were most interested in the solar eclipse, which makes sense because the path passed through five of those states. 88 percent of American adults watched the eclipse, either in person or online. That’s about twice the number of people who watched the Super Bowl in 2016.

New York was big into awards. It searched more than any other state for the Golden Globes®, the GRAMMY® Awards, and the Emmy® Awards.

Though South Carolina and Texas were the only states that searched the most for the showdown between boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and mixed martial artist (MMA) fighter Conor McGregor, it became the second biggest pay-per-view show of all time.

There were some firsts in 2017, too, that generated state-specific streaming searches. Alyssa London was the first of Tlingit descent to be crowned Miss Alaska USA, and with her selection to the top 10 finalists of the Miss USA pageant, Alaska’s interest was understandable. Tlingit, by the way, is an indigenous tribe in the Pacific Northwest, and its language, Lingit, means “People of the Tides.” Another first in 2017 was Miss North Dakota winning the Miss America pageant.

2017 also saw increased interest in eSports, or professional online gaming. Yes, you read that correctly. ESPN rolled out its “eSports” section in 2016, and 2017 saw it take off. For some perspective, according to Business Insider, only 34.1 million people watched the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM)–a series of international eSports tournaments around games like Starcraft II, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive–in 2016. In 2017, however, 46 million people tuned in online for IEM, and the tournament was the most-searched streaming event in California, Hawaii, and Louisiana.

2017 saw a lot of change. What will 2018 bring?

A Note on Methodology

2017 saw  a lot of events, from political theatre to natural disasters to the rise of bitcoin. Such things are unpredictable, so for this retrospective, we defined an “event” as anything that you could plan ahead to stream on TV. Many political developments and natural disasters therefore were not considered “events” in the context of this study. After compiling an extensive list of events that anyone could plan ahead and stream on TV in 2017, we used Google Trends data to research the search volume around phrases such as “stream the solar eclipse” or “stream the Kentucky Derby”. The search volume around these phrases, when compared against each other, were indicative of the favorite events of 2017 that we identified in this report.

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