Are you an NFL fan? If you are, are there particular teams or games you want to watch? The obvious answer to that second question would be “yes”, though the answer to whether you’ll actually be able to watch those games is much less obvious and much more convoluted. It depends which team, and which game, and on which day, and with which device. That’s because the NFL product has become so impossibly fractured across all kinds of broadcast and streaming partners that you have to wade through a labyrinth just to figure out if you’re subscribed to the right product for a particular game.
We talked about this already earlier this year when the NFL put a single game exclusively on Peacock. That brand new experiment didn’t go terribly, but it also didn’t do great. For streaming events, the numbers it drew were huge. So too was it surprising to learn that more people than I would have expected let their brand new Peacock subscriptions remain weeks and weeks after the game. On the other hand, the game didn’t do anything like the numbers NFL games typically do on broadcast television or streaming services that closely resemble them, such as YouTube TV.
Meanwhile, you could currently watch NFL games on cable, if you were in the right geographic area, on YouTube TV, on Amazon for Thursday night games, on Peacock, on ESPN Plus, or on the NFL’s NFL+ (but only if you are okay watching it on a phone or tablet). And now, on Christmas Day for the next several years, you’ll have to be a subscriber to Netflix to watch those games as well.
The first Netflix Christmas games will be this season, on December 25, 2024, (that’s a Wednesday, by the way). Netflix will get two Christmas games this year, Chiefs at Steelers and Ravens at Texans, with exact times to be announced later tonight at the NFL’s live schedule unveiling extravaganza (even the schedule release is an event now). The NFL says 2025 and 2026 will see “at least one” game on the service each Christmas. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.
When it comes to televised live events, the NFL is obviously king. If you look at the top 30 televised events for 2023, you will notice that 29 of them are NFL games. So it’s obvious why any streaming partner would want a piece of the game to attract those eyeballs to their platforms.
But at some point the product has to become so fractured to have a negative viewership effect, right? This cannot go on forever. And for all the fanfare around the Peacock exclusive game last year, there was also a lot of anger and frustration from folks that thought it was quite shitty that they had to sign up for yet another streaming service just to watch a single game due to the NFL’s insatiable appetite for cash.
But if the NFL is hoping to eventually unify its streaming rights, it won’t be able to do so until 2029.
Netflix has been dipping its toe into the NFL content stream with special reality-style documentaries like Quarterback and the upcoming Receiver, which star current NFL players, but this will be the first time the streamer will air live football. With NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV and Thursday Night Football games on Amazon Prime, the NFL is moving online more than ever. In a few years, things will get even wilder: In 2029, the NFL can cancel all the TV deals at the same time if it wants. That would lead to an unprecedented bidding war among all the TV and streaming providers and would upend the entire NFL content world.
While true, at some point NFL fans are just going to want to be able to know where they can watch the damned games. Having seven to ten places to have to either subscribe to and/or navigate to find that game is an opportunity cost that will eventually have an effect.
