Leave it to the NFL to add yet another week of intrigue and drama to the teeth of its off-season, such as that is.
In recent years, by the time Mother’s Day weekend began we would have already seen what the fall’s schedule actually looked like. The announcement, typically covered by ESPN and the league’s network with increasing fanfare and even the release of Week 1 pointspreads, usually occurred on the second Thursday of the month. As that day approached, the normally publicity-hungry league was atypically quiet. Finally we began to see news that this year’s sked will drop on May 15th. Which just happens to coincide with the exact day of the Netflix upfront presentation in New York City to advertisers who will be kicking off formal negotiations for commercial time with the major broadcasters and platforms.
Now as it’s beginning to turn out, it’s quite likely those facts are connected. The recently fired–er, “let go”– Boomer Esiason, late of what’s for the moment is still CBS Sports (whose parent company is eschewing formal upfront presentations) started the snowball when he teased this little nugget that the NEW YORK POST’s Erich Richter dropped to his readership on Wednesday:
Do not be surprised if the NFL and Netflix get in bed for a nice little Christmas Day football games,” Esiason said on his “Boomer and Gio” WFAN show with co-host Gregg Giannotti on Wednesday.
Esiason did mention to take this “little thing with a grain of salt” but believes he’ll be proven right.
Esiason is not generally known as a newsbreaker and some even initially dismissed this as a smidge of sour grapes against his now ex-broadcast network employer, who by all accounts was in line for at least one of the regular season games that the league will be playing on a Wednesday for only the fourth time in 76 seasons.
But another far more connected and media-savvy journalist was also on the case, as BUSINESS INSIDER’s Petr Kafka reported:
Netflix spent years telling everyone it had no interest in streaming sports. But that was then. Now Netflix looks like it is close to a deal to stream two NFL games on Christmas Day, reports Puck’s John Ourand, citing “a bevy of sources.”
Ourand has plenty of caveats in his report about the deal not being done, along with more significant to-be-sures: “Netflix has a lot more questions than answers right now about its Christmas plan, from who will produce the games to how much it will pay.”
Does that mean Netflix doesn’t know how much it will pay for the games? Or that Ourand doesn’t know how much Netflix will pay? Those are two very different ideas. Still, Ourand is a well-sourced, longtime sports rights pro, so his story is definitely worth taking seriously.
And if you have been paying attention to what we’ve been writing of late, you might realize that the appetite on both sides is ravenous.
For its part, the league has become increasingly democratic in spreading its wealth across a multitude of new, well-heeled, tech-savvy partners, points SB NATION’s Matt Warren was quick to recount and lament in a story that dropped yesterday:
NFL games have been available on streaming as an additional viewing option for several years, but it wasn’t until 2022 that the league began broadcasting games exclusively on a streaming platform. Amazon purchased the rights to Thursday Night Football broadcasts, and you’ve needed a Prime Video subscription in order to watch those games (unless you’re in the team’s home market).
In 2023, the NFL again partnered with Amazon to create a brand new streaming package for one Black Friday game per year. They also expanded their streaming services with the addition of a Peacock-exclusive regular season game. Now instead of one streaming service plus some way to watch ESPN, you needed two streamers.
The angst of the media and fans didn’t rise up at any of those changes. These games weren’t previously available to viewers, so there wasn’t an uproar. Games were more available, not less. Before games came to cable and streaming, you wouldn’t have been able to watch them on Sunday over the air. Now you had the chance.
That all changed in 2023, when the NFL moved one of the Wild Card games exclusively onto Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service and said the moves was good for fans. Now a game that had previously been available for free to everyone nationwide was going behind a paywall. And it worked. Really really well.
Nearly 3 million new subscribers signed up for Peacock to watch the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins in January 2024. Not only did they stay for the free trial, they converted and actually paid money. Reports say 71% of the new subscribers stayed on the streaming platform after the playoff game and with NBC’s coverage of the Summer Olympics coming to Peacock in 2024, it was a monumental win for the streaming service.
(And that doesn’t even count the move of NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV to YouTube last fall, when in spite of a $100/year price increase the league was quick to share it had already signed up more subscribers than it had in the previous year, and while at the time DirecTV was quick to point out the structural advantage a service readily available without a satellite dish had (despite its own efforts to increase the availability of its own streaming platform), they never did get around to issuing any numbers to refute the NFL’s claim).
So why should Netflix let so many of their streaming competitors hog all the fun?
Besides, if you’ve been reading what we’ve been musing on our sister site, you’re well aware that for all the success that Netflix has had in becoming the most watched and engaged platform anywhere, they enter these upfronts at a clear disadvantage to Prime Video:
And yes, advertisers do love the NFL. And despite the kind of high-minded bitching and moaning that Warren shared later on,, much as they did with Peacock and YouTube, more fans than not will figure it all out.
About the only factors working against this being truly transformational are the calendar and fates of the teams that will be playing. Next year Christmas will be on Thursday, where Amazon would clearly have an advantage to be in line for at least the prime time game. But they may not be quite as voracious to step up and pay because they know all too well that when you’re forced to lock in what in spring looks like a fantastic matchup doesn’t always work. As Jon Lewis of FRONT OFFICE SPORTS reported last fall:
The NFL’s Black Friday debut delivered one of the league’s ten smallest audiences this season.
In the first ever NFL game on Black Friday, Jets-Dolphins averaged a 4.0 rating and 9.61 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video — marking the lowest rated and second-least watched game on Prime this season. Not helping matters was the state of the Jets, a marquee team before the season started that quickly became a national TV albatross once Aaron Rodgers got hurt.
That said, Lewis was also quick to note what the league could offer up to them as counterpoints:
The Dolphins’ easy win still delivered the largest football audience on Black Friday since 2011, when an Arkansas-LSU college game averaged 10.4 million on CBS. It dominated college football head-to-head, more-than-doubling the competing Missouri-Arkansas game on CBS (4.09M) and UTSA-Tulane on ABC (1.72M).
And we know how Christmas Day games dominate the NBA, or anything else that dares to air at the same time.
And there’s always the off chance that Amazon AND Netflix will each have a Christma game because, hey, fans do know how to use a remote.
But that’s down the road. For now, the mere fact that yet another behemoth is bellying up to the bar is newsworthy enough.
And remember, Netflix was basically telegraphing it all along. You think they’d be this successful if they were called ETIX?
Courage…