Netflix wants to secure a package of NFL Sunday afternoon games
Netflix wants to secure a package of NFL Sunday afternoon games
The league can get out of broadcast deals with CBS and Fox as soon as 2030, and if that happens Netflix could jump into the fray.
They say it’s good to have a five-year plan, and Netflix’s current plan is a doozy, especially when it comes to live sports. That’s because John Ourand of Puck News is reporting that Netflix wants to pursue a Sunday afternoon package of NFL games in the future. If it does, it would represent a considerable turnaround in Netflix’s thinking about live sports on its platform. For most of the streaming giant’s existence, it has shied away from live events of any kind, but in recent years, that strategy has been shifting, highlighted by two Christmas Day NFL games last season.
Key Details:
- Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria told Puck it wants to pursue Sunday afternoon NFL games in the future.
- Those games could be available to bid on as soon as 2030.
- As recently as January, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos called season-long sports deals “challenging.”
Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria reportedly told Puck’s Matthew Belloni directly that Netflix is interested in bidding on a package of Sunday afternoon NFL games should they become available. If so, it would constitute the biggest potential investment by Netflix in a live sports package by far; Paramount’s current Sunday NFL package costs it around $2 billion per season.
The streamer will have to bide its time for a few years if it really wants to get into the mix for a slice of the Sunday NFL pie. Those packages currently belong to CBS and Fox, and the league’s deal with those networks runs until 2034 — at least on paper. The league can opt out of its deals as soon as 2030, and many industry experts expect it to do just that in order to maximize the earning potential of its rights.
In other words, if the NFL opts out of its media rights deals, it will do so to secure more money than the $110 billion in total value of its current TV contracts. Netflix will have to pony up a considerable sum if it is really serious about snagging those games for itself.
Will Netflix be willing to spend what it takes to get a parcel of Sunday afternoon NFL games? If you had asked me two years ago, the answer would have been a definite no. For a long time, Netflix resisted the idea of presenting live sports on its platform, with company executives saying that major sports deals would be a drag on the streamer’s profit margins. As recently as January, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that the “underlying economics of full-season big league sports [are] extremely challenging.”
There’s no denying, however, that the NFL is a different beast when it comes to ratings. Yes, the rights to a Sunday package would be very expensive, but they would undeniably deliver an audience. The two Christmas Day NFL games on Netflix in 2024 — the first time the streamer had ever hosted an NFL game — reached a total of 65 million people in the United States, and that alone may have been enough to convince company officials that a wider pursuit of NFL rights was in Netflix’s best interest.
There’s still time for Netflix to get its ducks in a row, as Sunday NFL rights will not be available for at least another five years. But the streamer’s serious consideration of pursuing those rights represents a complete change in its philosophy of pursuing live sports deals.
Netflix
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