The National Football League’s (NFL) bet on streaming is paying off, helping to grow its fan base in the United States and around the world.
Hans Schroeder, NFL executive vice president of media distribution, said at CNBC x Boardroom’s “The Game Plan” sports business event on Tuesday that the league’s recent series of exclusive streaming deals with media companies demonstrates the league’s efforts to grow viewership.
When the NFL signed an 11-year, $111 billion media rights deal in 2021, streaming was already part of it. “Thursday Night Football” AmazonUnder the deal, the company will begin distributing the games on Prime Video, and other traditional media broadcast partners have been given permission to begin streaming the games on their own services.
And that was just the beginning. The following year, the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” package, which allowed viewers to watch out-of-market games, GoogleYouTube TV. ComcastNBCUniversal began streaming “Sunday Night Football” games on Peacock alongside the regular broadcast, and later acquired an exclusive wild-card game to be aired exclusively on the streaming service. Netflix And starting this year, they have secured a contract to broadcast games on Christmas Day.
“I see this move as the latest in a journey that began maybe 15 years ago when Steve Jobs met with a small group of us,” Schroeder said, adding that the former CEO apple The CEO showed the group an early version of the iPhone and explained how it would impact consumers: “And that led us to retain the rights to live gaming on mobile phones.”
Schroeder said this was the first of many steps the NFL will take to move much of its current media rights strategy to focus on streaming.
A sign that this strategy is working was the NFL Wild Card Game, which aired exclusively on Peacock earlier this year: It was the most-streamed live event in history, with 27.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
“For us, taking the wild-card game, one of the most valuable and most-watched games of the year, I think was the most transformative moment we’ve had in years. [on Peacock]” Schroeder said.
The streaming expansion has continued this season: Last week, the NFL’s first game in Brazil was streamed exclusively on Peacock, averaging 14 million viewers.
“We commend the NFL for letting us put on the lab coats and run this experiment,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said at the Game Plan event.
He noted that Peacock’s sports strategy will launch with English Premier League games and other sports games such as the NFL in 2020, and will continue to grow with NBA games in the 2025-26 season.
Similarly, Lori Conkling, YouTube’s global head of TV, film and sports partnerships, said during Tuesday’s session that data the company has across its platforms shows strong viewership for sports, underscoring why “Sunday Ticket” makes sense as a service.
Most of the NFL’s media rights deals are with traditional broadcast partners, and live sports have maintained large audiences on traditional TV even as consumers shift from cable to streaming services, with the majority of viewers still coming from traditional TV, according to ratings data.
Schroeder said Tuesday that the NFL’s strategy is to exist in both the traditional TV and streaming worlds. Still, he said the league wants to grow its fan base and go in the same direction as consumers — toward streaming. Playing games overseas is just one part of the league’s expansion outside the U.S.
“The Netflix deal will likely be the first truly global deal,” Schroeder said, “and we expect that our global audience alone will rival the reach of our U.S. programming.”
Netflix plans to stream NFL games for the next three years, with two games scheduled to stream on the platform this year and at least one more in 2025 and 2026.
Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.
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