Will Netflix Start Using Nielsen Ratings to Sell Itself to Sports Leagues After Deciding Not to Share Subscriber Totals?
Amazon has leveraged the power of Nielsen ratings for “Thursday Night Football,” and Netflix could do likewise going forward.
After making its first major sports-adjacent deal in its history, there’s officially room to speculate on what sports Netflix could pursue next. Netflix signed a 10-year, $5 billion deal to stream “WWE Raw” starting in 2025 in late January, and industry talking-heads are already wondering what other sports Netflix could go after. But with Netflix’s recent decision to no longer report its subscriber totals to the public, will it still be able to convince sports leagues it wants to partner with that it’s a good potential broadcaster for their games?
- Netflix has nearly 270 million customers but will stop reporting its totals publicly in Q1 2025.
- Company co-CEO Ted Sarandos said Netflix isn’t anti-sports, but pro-growth.
- Prime Video uses Nielsen ratings to quantify its sports successes, and Netflix could do likewise in the future.
At last count, Netflix had 269.6 million global customers. But the public won’t have access to this data for much longer, as the company told observers in a shareholders letter after its last quarterly earnings report that it would no longer share its subscriber totals starting in the first quarter of 2025.
But some experts are anxious about what that decision could mean for Netflix’s pursuit of live sports in the future. Long opposed to adding live sports to his platform, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during the conference call to discuss its quarterly earnings with analysts that he’s not anti-sports, but simply “pro-profitable growth.” A note by Guggenheim analyst Michael Morris, as reported by Front Office Sports outlines why some analysts are questioning Netflix’s decision not to report subscriber numbers to the public.
“Eliminating regular reporting of membership data raises questions around management’s confidence to further grow the base, though it is not implausible that the change is intended to reduce quarterly sentiment volatility around relatively small changes in true economic drivers,” Morris wrote.
Will Netflix Start Leaning on Nielsen Ratings?
Prime Video has never made regular reports of its subscriber totals to the public, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a big name in sports streaming. Amazon’s streamer offers the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football,” alongside a selection of WNBA games, a package of New York Yankees games for that team’s local audience, and more, and while it recently confirmed that it had more than 200 million global customers, it has never released a specific total.
Amazon uses Nielsen ratings to tout the success of “TNF” games on its streamer instead of pointing to subscriber totals. Nielsen measured that “TNF” on Prime Video saw a 24% jump in ratings per game over the 2022 season last year, and Nielsen is clearly willing to work closely with the streamer. Concern arose last year regarding a plan to incorporate internal Amazon metrics in Nielsen’s ratings, but subsided when Nielsen chose to continue using only its own measurements for “TNF” ratings.
Netflix could easily make a similar deal with Nielsen to measure how many sets around the country are tuning into its sports events going forward. Netflix regularly beats Prime Video in Nielsen's The Gauge report, which measures how viewers are spending their TV time each month, and ratings for live sports events on the streamer are likely to be healthy enough to show leagues who are considering doing business with Netflix that such partnerships are a wise decision.
Netflix won’t be offering a regular, live sports-adjacent event until it begins streaming “WWE Raw” in 2025 when it will also stop reporting subscriber totals publicly. But once that happens, it will need a way to prove to other sports leagues that it can draw a large enough audience to make it a good broadcast partner for those leagues. As Prime Video did, partnering with Nielsen to rate its live events could be the best solution for Netflix as it makes the case to leagues that it can compete with the audiences they found on linear TV.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Amazon Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.