How streaming services affect Fan Viewership in the NFL
While the 2023 NFL season brought joy to many fans this year, many were outraged at exclusive partnerships that the NFL had made with multiple paid streaming services, such as Amazon Prime and Peacock. For decades fans used to be able to watch NFL games comfortably live through their television providers or on their cable box. But with the rapid growth in the number of streaming sites, as well as their popularity, the NFL brokered deals with Amazon and NBC to exclusively stream some of their primetime games, leaving many fans enraged. Prior to the 2022 season, the NFL signed an exclusive deal with Amazon Prime to stream all of the beloved Thursday night games.
This streaming deal was signed in 2021 and put into effect in 2022 when Amazon exclusively began to stream 15 Thursday night football games. This outraged fans because they had to pay $14.99 a month to watch Thursday night football. The deal will last for a decade at minimum while Amazon pays the NFL a hefty fee of one billion dollars a year. In the 2023 season, Amazon furthered its stake in the NFL by purchasing exclusive rights to the inaugural Black Friday football game — paying 100 million dollars for just this one game.
Amazon is not the only streaming site trying to acquire exclusive game rights. NBC and their streaming service Peacock acquired exclusive access to some NFL games. Peacock and the NFL made a deal that allowed Peacock exclusive rights to an NFL playoff game. Peacock paid the NFL an astonishing $110 million just for the Chiefs versus Dolphins playoff game. Playoff games are the single most important game in the season and for die-hard fans, adding more subscription costs to an already hefty fee to watch NFL games was a burden. This new exclusive deal may have prevented fans from watching their beloved playoff game and may impact their viewing experience going foward.
The proliferation of these streaming deals has raised many questions — Is the NFL sacrificing its fans to make a profit? What are streaming services trying to achieve from exclusive streamed games? The NFL is by far the most profitable sports league and they are actively profiting from their fans’ dedication to their teams. In fact, in 2022 the NFL made roughly $18 billion, while the second closest sports league, the Indian Premier League for Cricket, made almost half of that at $9.5 billion. For Amazon Prime and Peacock, their goal was to get people to sign up for their monthly service and then keep it due to the large catalog of other television series, movies, and sports events available on these services, Peacock actually tried to counter any fan animosity by offering a No Ad break in the fourth quarter. Unfortunately, there was major backlash and fans were irritated that rather than an ad breaks sponsors were constantly announced throughout the fourth quarter. Despite this initial backlash, with the rapid growth of streaming sites, there will undoubtedly be more exclusively streamed games in the future.
https://fortune.com/2024/01/25/peacock-nfl-playoff-new-subscribers/
