Outside the Beltway

The NFL is Taking Over

The biggest entertainment product in America is getting bigger.

James Joyner · Saturday, December 24, 2022 · 8 comments

Hollywood Reporter (“With YouTube Deal, the NFL Cements Itself as the Most Powerful Force in Entertainment“):

Beginning next year, there will be one entertainment provider that receives more than $1 billion annually from Paramount, NBCUniversal, Fox, Disney, Amazon and YouTube. Oh, they’ll also get about $50 million annually from Apple, which is paying the hefty fee to sponsor 20 minutes of content per year (the Super Bowl Halftime Show).

That provider is the NFL, and its product is very, very, very in demand.

Everyone knows that the NFL, led by commissioner Roger Goodell, is the undisputed king of live TV, with its games across its TV and streaming partners averaging numbers unmatched by anything else (save for an occasional World Cup final or college football game). The league’s newly announced deal with YouTube for its Sunday Ticket package only underscores its strength.

The NFL will now take in $120 billion over the next decade, not only from legacy TV companies like NBC, CBS, Disney and Fox, but arguably the three most powerful companies in technology today: Apple, Amazon and Google.

With the traditional pay-TV bundle in serious decline (Disney CEO Bob Iger said traditional TV is marching toward a “precipice” earlier this year, and that it will soon be pushed off), it gives the league exposure to companies impervious to those issues…and that may even benefit from it.

“[Sunday Ticket is] a product that’s existed for a long time, but it’s a product that is embarking on its next breakthrough phase in terms of distribution method, and it’s going from a very particular form of satellite distribution to something that’s much more broadly available,” Dhruv Prasad, senior vp media strategy and strategic investments for the NFL, said in a virtual press conference Thursday.

In a media universe where every company with an attachment to the legacy pay-TV bundle is sweating, not only are those companies seeking optionality (hence the streaming rights baked into the deals), but the league is, too. It is entirely possible by the end of the current deal that the cable bundle is a shell of what it is today, and that broadcast networks aren’t the reach machines they have traditionally been.

[…]

YouTube, which controls the most popular streaming video platform on the planet, and the largest virtual multichannel video provider in YouTube TV, is also being given leeway to innovate, both in product and pricing.  

Prasad says that the league wants YouTube to offer Sunday Ticket at an “accessible” price point. “YouTube has the freedom to price the product the way they think the market wants it,” he says. 

And the company’s experience in video distribution is a factor as well. The league has made a point of wanting to expand its reach through technology and alternate broadcasts, be that the Manningcast on ESPN2 or Amazon’s X-ray technology.  

Front Office Sports (“The NBA’s Christmas Tradition Could Finally Be Challenged…By The NFL“):

Since the 1980s, the NBA has become synonymous with Christmas Day, similar to the NFL with Thanksgiving or college football with New Year’s Day.

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But tomorrow, because the holiday falls on a weekend this year, the NFL will try to play Grinch, rolling out its first ever Christmas Day tripleheader.

Now, the Association won’t just have to share its annual holiday, but there may be nothing stopping the NFL from making Christmas one of its new traditions — no matter which day of the week it falls on.

[…]

For decades, the NFL seldom played on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve — unless the holiday fell on a weekend.

[…]

Back in 2014, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban warned that a “greedy” NFL would cannibalize its ratings by adding too many new game windows. “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy,” Cuban declared.

Nearly a decade later, it seems Friday night high school football is the only remaining territory upon which the Shield won’t encroach.

The NFL held its first Christmas Day games in 1971. The games weren’t received well and the league hit pause until 1989. Since then, it has only intermittently scheduled games on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Yet when the NFL swooped in last year with its first Christmas Day doubleheader in four years, the strategy paid off. The two games averaged a whopping 20 million viewers — besting the NBA’s numbers fivefold.

The NFL has essentially taken over the entire Christmas weekend this year, playing games Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

And why not? Over the last five years, 49 of the Top 50 and 92 of the Top 100 most-watched telecasts have been NFL games, according to Nielsen.

And next year, the league will invade Black Friday for the first time.

I vividly recall Cuban’s prediction and thinking he was on to something. Part of what makes the NFL special compared to other sports is the comparative rarity of the product. At the time, teams played a 16-game regular schedule (since expanded to 17 and almost certainly headed for 18), compared to 162 for Major League Baseball and 82 each for the NBA and NHL. And games were primarily relegated to Sundays, with one game each on Monday and Thursday night.

But, in an era where there’s a glut of scripted entertainment able to be watched whenever the viewer wants—often months or even years after it was first released—live sports are the only content that most insist on watching in real time. And, despite constantly spreading itself thinner, the NFL has only expanded its dominance.

Essentially every show ranked in the top 50 last year was a sporting event. The only exceptions were a post-Super Bowl premiere of a rebooted “Equalizer” franchise and an Oprah Winfrey interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markel. Fourteen NFL games were ranked ahead of the College Football National Championship game between Ohio State and Alabama. The deciding game of the NBA Finals was ranked 26th. The NCAA Basketball Championship was ranked 30th. The deciding game of the World Series was ranked 48th. (47 and 49 were random NFL games from early November.)

NFL Sunday Ticket’s move to YouTube is ruffling some feathers. It has been carried stateside by DirecTV since its 1994 debut. That was aggravating in that it required that people use that satellite service for their television bundle but was mitigated by the debut of various streaming options in 2009. Folks who don’t have great Internet speeds are essentially being shut out of the service. Of course, there are bigger problems than getting football games if you’re in that boat in 2022.

The irony is that Sunday Ticket was long a loss leader for DirecTV and YouTube will pay more for less. Not only is the license to distribute to bars, restaurants, and the like not included but with fewer and fewer games on Sunday afternoons, there’s less programming for the service.

Older fans will surely also be aggravated by the sheer difficulty of figuring out where to watch games, since they’ll be spread among a variety of services. One would think that subscribing to Sunday Ticket would do the trick, since it’s advertised as an all-access pass. But, in reality, the service only has Sunday afternoon games not broadcast in the market where the subscriber resides.

So, for example, Sunday afternoon Dallas Cowboys games are frequently available on my local Fox or CBS affiliate. That means I watch them via Hulu. But, if the Washington Redskins Commanders or Baltimore Ravens are playing at the same time, I need to go to Sunday Ticket. (One advantage of Sunday Ticket is that, if the Cowboys game is after the Commanders game but the latter runs late, I can switch to Sunday Ticket and watch the beginning of the game, whereas those without the service simply miss the action until the network switches over.) If the Cowboys play Sunday, Monday, or Thursday night (or, as today, on Saturday afternoon) I just have to figure out what network it’s on and watch via Hulu.

Increasingly, though, that’s not going to be how it works. I suspect CBS content will be on their Paramount app, not your streaming bundle, in the near future. Ditto NBC and Peacock. Some Thursday night games are already on Amazon, although I don’t think the Cowboys have been featured in one of those.

I’m reasonably adept at Google and will figure it all out. And my household is both large and affluent enough that we can justify subscribing to multiple services. I’ll likely leave Hulu for YouTubeTV unless there’s a separate Sunday Ticket bundle that’s cheaper.