NFL

The NFL is breaking new ground this season with a September game in Brazil, the first time a regular-season contest will take place in South America. The Week 1 game will be exclusively streamed on Peacock, giving NBCUniversal three stand-alone games in the first week of the season.

Peacock had an exclusive playoff game this season, which drew 23 million viewers.

The NFL isn’t just the most popular sports league in the U.S., it’s also the most valuable with the highest-rated programming and the priciest ad time. In 2021 the league signed an estimated $110 billion worth of media deals covering 11 years, which reportedly was nearly double the value of its previous contracts. With tech giants Alphabet and Amazon, along with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, snapping up digital rights to NFL games, and with the announcement this week that Disney’s ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery are launching a streaming service tailored to sports fans, it’s clear that streaming is poised to be the NFL’s next frontier, despite some backlash from fans.

A romance between the pop star and Travis Kelce has dominated social media, but TV broadcasts are focusing on it less than many seem to think. (Charlie Riedel/AP)

NBCUniversal‘s Peacock deal to exclusively stream the NFL‘s AFC Wild Card matchup between the Kansas City Chief and the Miami Dolphins delivered an end-zone spiking TD for the streamer, according to new data. NBCU already claimed the Jan. 13 playoff game was the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history — delivering an average audience of 23 million viewers. While NBCU didn’t quantify the lift in Peacock subscriptions the game yielded, a new report from research firm Antenna puts a number on it: Peacock saw a total of 2.8 million sign-ups over NFL Wild Card Game weekend. According to Antenna, that makes the Chiefs-Dolphins game the single biggest subscriber acquisition event it has ever measured.

It is the third time the trio will call the big game together. The telecast will be produced by Jim Rikhoff and directed by Mike Arnold.

Walt Disney Co. and the National Football League are said to be in earnest talks, according to two people familiar with the matter, that could have the league take a stake in ESPN while putting its NFL Media unit, which the sports body has been trying to monetize in better fashion, under the media company’s control. Such a move would further align Disney with the NFL, making it difficult for the company to lose valuable sports rights to show top-rated football games, and could put such NFL assets as the NFL Network and RedZone under Disney’s aegis.

The first exclusively streaming playoff game boosts the debut of the Ted series on NBCUniversal’s streamer.

New York governor Kathy Hochul announced Saturday that Sunday’s Pittsburgh Steelers-Buffalo Bills playoff game schedulled for 1 p.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+ will be rescheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET on Monday, thanks to the massive winter storm hitting the area. The game had originally been scheduled for 1 p.m. ET on Sunday.

The National Football League isn’t officially saying anything yet, but the league just suffered a major loss. Failing to get the nearly decade-long antitrust lawsuit over the lucrative Sunday Ticket package thrown out of court, the Roger Goodell-run NFL is going to trial for potentially $6.1 billion just over a week after this year’s Super Bowl.

Saturday night’s game will be shown on Peacock after NBCUniversal won the rights last May. The game will be broadcast on the NBC affiliates in Kansas City and Miami, following the NFL’s protocol for Thursday night games streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Everyone else will have to pay for a Peacock subscription — plans start at $5.99 per month — to watch the game, and some fans are less than thrilled about the NFL putting a playoff game behind a paywall for the first time.

The game, between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins, is the biggest test yet for whether live sports will find a comfortable home on streaming services.

The biggest ratings force in American television is about to kick off high holy postseason services, but ridiculous impediments for the rapt audience await.

The 17.9 million average is the second highest since 2015. Buoyed by increases of at least 24% in two of the five packages, the first year of the league’s new television contracts saw a 17.9 million total from a year ago. (Darron Cummings/AP)

Boosted by a full season of games on ABC, rising viewing on Prime Video Thursday Night Football, and three big extra Christmas Day games, NFL’s average regular-season game is up 10% to 17.9 million Nielsen-measured viewers through 16 weeks of the season. ABC, which added a full season of Monday Night Football games simulcast with ESPN, witnessed a massive boost of 33% to average 17.1 million. Prime Video’s TNF package of games is 25% higher versus a year ago to 11.8 million viewers.

The Dec. 23 contest, the first to be exclusively on Peacock, will be commercial free. NBCUniversal says there will be a 40% reduction in the standard ad time for an NFL game that should result in at least 12 additional minutes of game-related content.

Prime Video executives aren’t prepared to guarantee a ratings bonanza with the first NFL game on Black Friday. They mainly hope it succeeds in seeding a new annual pop culture event on the day after Thanksgiving. “We’ll see how it goes, but our expectation and the NFL’s expectation is that this becomes an annual tradition,” said Jay Marine, VP of Prime Video and global head of sports, during a media conference call.

Amazon Prime Video plans to carry the first “Black Friday” game later this week, serving Americans touchdowns and online shopping as an alternative to battling deal-seekers at the mall. The technology giant plans to load up the game with sales promotions in a bid to turn the Friday after Thanksgiving into a major digital shopping day.

Charissa Thompson’s statement that she had made up reports during NFL games on Fox left many of her counterparts aghast.

Fox Sports and Amazon Prime Video host Charissa Thompson used to be a sideline reporter for NFL games, but she admitted that not everything she reported was true. Speaking on the Pardon My Take podcast, Thompson talked about her experience as a sideline reporter and the conversations they have with coaches and players, primarily just before or right after halftime. Typically before the game starts, the sideline reporter will give any details coaches told them, but she sometimes made up what they say.

The Super Bowl isn’t the only big football property that will be crammed full of advertising. Amazon’s Prime Video has sold out all the commercial inventory attached to its new “Black Friday” game, the first event the NFL has earmarked for the day after Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday-shopping season, according to Danielle Carney, head of NFL ad-sales for the company. Amazon has also sold out of ad inventory in the Thursday Night Football games slated for Nov. 16 and 30, she says, in part because the company has tried to sell broader ad packages that connect an ad message across a broader swath of content.

Apple has asked a U.S. judge to reject a subpoena that could require the company to reveal corporate secrets tied to its failed effort to carry the National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” programming, now on Google’s YouTube TV. In a filing in California federal court, Apple’s attorneys on Monday opposed a subpoena from residential and commercial Sunday Ticket subscribers who accused the NFL and its teams in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit of violating U.S. antitrust law in the distribution of Sunday Ticket.

The NFL commissioner has signed a new deal that will keep him at the helm of the league through March 2027. The announcement was made as the NFL owners meet in New York this week.

As the NFL prepares for its third straight Sunday in London, the league already has discussed the idea of one day playing a Super Bowl in the British capital, according to commissioner Roger Goodell. A Super Bowl in London is not happening anytime soon, but the NFL has at least considered the possibility of it.

As Spoon Daftary and executive producer Mike Muriano started building the TNF studio team, they were aware of the natural constraints all pregame, halftime and postgame shows have structurally. But as Amazon became the league’s first new media partner in nearly 30 years, the company also saw the opportunity of a blank canvas.

Toyota and the National Football League have entered into a multiyear sponsorship agreement designating Toyota as the official automotive partner of the NFL. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, other than it is “multiyear,” says David Christ, Toyota group VP-GM. The deal was announced on Toyota social media this morning via a 30-second video from AOR Saatchi & Saatchi.

The league and its TV partners have not been shy about trying to capitalize on the “situationship” and gain new fans, particularly members of Gen Z and more women — although marketing experts are skeptical there will be much of a bump in the long run.

A week after Charter and Disney made peace on the distribution front, DirecTV and Nexstar have set a multi-year carriage renewal, ending a dispute that started in early July.

The agreement was announced this morning in a brief joint press release, with the companies saying they “greatly appreciate the patience of their subscribers and viewers during this negotiation.” Signals from 176 Nexstar stations as well as cable network NewsNation had been restored on Sunday as the final deal was being completed.