Ambimama - India

Professional American football is called the Super Bowl

The winning Super Bowl team receives the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

It is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL) in the United States. The game and its ancillary festivities constitute Super Bowl Sunday, which over the years has become likened to an unofficial U.S. national holiday.

The Super Bowl is usually the most-watched U.S. television broadcast of the year, attracting many companies to spend millions of dollars on commercials.

This has caused the starting time of the game to be pushed back later and later, to ensure the Sunday night prime time audience on the East Coast. The last true day game (which ended before local sunset) of the series was Super Bowl XI in January 1977.

In addition, many popular singers and musicians have performed during the Super Bowl’s pre-game and halftime ceremonies. This is the second-largest U.S. food consumption day, following Thanksgiving.

By any measure, the Super Bowl is one of the most watched television programs of the year in the U.S.
It is estimated that 130-140 million tune into some part of the game.

Following Apple Computer’s 1984 commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh computer, directed by Ridley Scott, the broadcast of the Super Bowl became the premier showcase for high concept or simply extravagantly expensive commercials.

Famous commercial campaigns include the Budweiser “Bud Bowl” campaign, and the 1999 and 2000 dot-com ads. Prices have increased each year, with reports citing a record US$2.6 million for a 30 second spot during Super Bowl XLI in 2007. Many people tune in to the Super Bowl solely to watch the creative commercials.

Given the immense popularity of the Super Bowl, it may be surprising to discover that videotapes of the telecasts of the first two Super Bowls are not known to exist.

Janet Jackson’s (in)famous act:
During halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston in the year 2004, Justin Timberlake removed a piece of Janet Jackson’s top, exposing her right breast with a star-shaped ring around the nipple.

Timberlake and Jackson have maintained that the incident was accidental, calling it a “wardrobe malfunction.” To make matters worse, the game was airing on CBS, and MTV (at the time, a corporate sister company of CBS within Viacom), produced the halftime show.

Immediately after that live (not tape-delayed) moment, the producer cut to a very wide-angle shot and the announcer said, “Thank you for watching the Super Bowl halftime show!” followed immediately by a commercial break. However, viewers with TiVo captured the moment in detail, and video captures circulated quickly on the Internet.

The NFL, embarrassed from the incident, permanently banned MTV from doing another halftime show in any capacity. This also led to the FCC tightening controls on indecency and fining CBS US$225,000 for the incident, as well as fining each of CBS’s then twenty owned and operated stations. The following year, Paul McCartney gave an uncontroversial halftime performance for Super Bowl XXXIX.