Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- ABC's Super Bowl broadcast drew the highest national ratings since 2000 as the Pittsburgh Steelers won a record-tying fifth National Football League championship.

The Steelers' 21-10 win over the Seattle Seahawks on Feb. 5 in Detroit was watched on the Walt Disney Co. network in an average 41.6 percent of the 110.2 million U.S. homes with televisions, according to Nielsen Media Research Inc. That's the highest since St. Louis beat Tennessee six years ago, drawing 43.3 percent of viewers.

The Super Bowl has been the most-watched TV event in the U.S. since 1995 and has attracted a national rating of at least 40 percent in 32 of the 40 championship games, according to Nielsen. That kind of exposure led advertisers to pay an average of $2.5 million, a record, for each 30-second spot, said Karen McCallum, a buyer at Esparza Advertising in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

``The Super Bowl is a ratings juggernaut no matter who is playing,'' said Marc Ganis, president of SportsCorp Ltd., a Chicago-based consulting firm.

New England's victory last year over Philadelphia in Jacksonville, Florida, was watched in 41.1 percent of U.S. homes with televisions on News Corp.'s Fox network. New England's win over Carolina in 2004 had a 41.4 rating on CBS, following the 40.7 percent for the 2003 Super Bowl on ABC.

The highest national Super Bowl rating was in 1982, when the San Francisco 49ers, led by quarterback Joe Montana, beat the Cincinnati Bengals 26-21 and attracted 49.1 percent of the U.S. television households.

The Steelers-Seahawks game had lower ratings in the 56 largest U.S. markets than last year because those teams come from smaller markets than the 2005 competitors.

Seattle and Pittsburgh are the 12th and 22nd biggest U.S. TV markets, while Philadelphia and Boston, which produced higher large-market ratings last year, are the fourth- and sixth-largest U.S. media markets.

Next year's Super Bowl will be played in Miami and televised on CBS.

To contact the reporter on this story: Allan Kreda in New York at akreda@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: February 7, 2006 13:47 EST