Cord cutting is taking a chunk out of Big Shield.
As recently reported by Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, NFL Network has a current distribution of 51.1 million homes. That’s a steep drop from its all-time high of 72.5 million in October 2013.
Just since the start of last season, the league-owned broadcast channel has lost five million homes.
It’s not specific to NFL Network. More and more people are dumping cable, and more and more people are relying on streaming services.
It explains the recent effort to push audiences to NFL+, the league’s in-house non-linear product. We’ve repeatedly heard that NFL+ has been a significant disappointment for the league; absent live events (like games), it’s hard to persuade people to choose to add NFL+ to an ever-expanding menu of monthly streaming charges.
Ben Fischer of SBJ notes that the drop in household comes after NFL Network set multiple records in 2022 for early-morning games from Europe. But the net impact on NFL Network was negative, given that it surrendered previously exclusive Thursday night games to Amazon.
When it comes to TV, everything is changing. The puck is slap-shotting away from the traditional model of paying one charge for a broad array of channels, and then watching only a few of them. Now, viewers are picking what they want to purchase, which will be far more likely to mesh with what they actually watch.