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For the longest time, you could count on tens of millions of Americans tuning into pro football every weekend. Things would come and go, but the league's ratings were a behemoth that only grew.
In many ways, that's still true. The NFL is wildly popular — no sport, no TV product at all, even comes close. The league's newly struck TV deal, worth $113 billion in total, is proof of that. But ratings did decline seven percent in 2020.
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To be clear, the NFL is not struggling. Even with that drop, regular season games — mostly meaningless matchups — averaged 15.4 million viewers, which is plainly bonkers. The Super Bowl had 102 million viewers. So yeah, not struggling.
But things are changing. The NFL itself signaled that fact with the details of its massive new TV deal.
Much of the agreement is status quo. Media giants Disney, NBCUniversal (Comcast), Fox, and CBS shelled out $9 billion per year through 2033 for the rights to various games. But an unmistakable trend emerged in the details of that deal: The NFL is prepping for a post-cable world.
First of all, Amazon's taken a bigger bite of the NFL apple. The retail/streaming giant scored exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football. Amazon has simulcast games since 2017 and had one exclusive game last season — but now it's shelled out $1 billion per year to be the only Thursday Night Football broadcaster.
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Even the traditional media companies negotiated carve-outs that would allow the firms to move NFL content to various streaming services. CBS will stream all its games on Paramount+; Disney has the right to simulcast on ESPN+; NBC will simulcast and have some exclusive offerings through Peacock. Fox apparently has a streaming service called Tubi — seriously, that's a real thing — which will be able to stream NFL games. DirectTV, meanwhile, seems like it won't be re-upping its Sunday Ticket deal with the NFL, which allows fans to watch every out-of-market game, when the contract is up in 2022.
"The streaming experiment just went up a notch," Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive told CNN Business. "This is a culmination of a 20 year strategy of the NFL adding partners in an incremental way that validates the traditional, established networks it works with while bringing in new distribution partners."
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People are changing how they watch stuff. ESPN cable subscribers have fallen for years, even as ESPN+ is now up to more than 12 million subscribers.
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Here's the dirty little secret of the streaming services, though. At this point, aren't we just chasing the thing cable always did? Sports properties, the NFL and ESPN, namely, helped push cable package prices for years. And now, any NFL fan will have to dish out cash for ESPN and Amazon, at the very least, on top of some form of traditional TV. And that's just until the networks start making games streaming-exclusive as well.
Overall you may end paying more than cable — cord-cutting is no longer cheap. If a big NFL fan wanted to walk away from cable, they'd have to buy five services.
The fact that the NFL made this deal shows a couple of things. One, it remains a powerhouse in a world of declining ratings — $9 billion per year is a staggering figure. But the price is worth it to media giants because the NFL is a life raft of guaranteed eyeballs.
And two, the NFL rights deal shows the league is prepping for a media world vastly different than the current state of things. Yes, it will be tied to broadcasters (plus Amazon) for another decade or so. But there's a good chance those media giants will look vastly different by the end of the deal. And we'll be watching on streaming services — not on cable.