With Success of Peacock’s Wild Card Game, Are We Headed to a Pay-Per-View NFL Playoffs?

This past weekend saw the first-ever streaming-exclusive NFL playoff game, and Peacock claims 27.6 million viewers tuned in to watch. (That number came via 16.3 million concurrent streaming devices.) Surely, many of those viewers were first-time Peacock subscribers. It seems the stunt worked for Peacock, but does this raise the possibility that we’re headed for more of this kind of thing in the future?

Historically, media companies have offered playoff games on both their linear and streaming properties. This year’s Super Bowl will be available on CBS and Paramount+, for example. But Sunday’s Wild Card game was the first playoff game to be a streaming-only affair. It’s a bold move. In the best-case scenario, new Peacock subscribers will stick around. But in the worst case, fans who paid to stream the game will cancel immediately afterward, feeling like they got ripped off. KC-Miami wasn’t even a competitive game.

The fact is, the NFL is the most powerful force in live television. In 2023, 93 of the top 100 most-watched TV programs were NFL games. College football took another three spots on the list. No other sport cracked the Top 100. So ultimately, if a media company wants to use football games as a gun to the head of its audience, it can probably get away with it.

But this strategy is incredibly risky.

The NFL became this popular for several reasons, but one important key has been the easy availability of games. You can watch a ton of football with an antenna or cable or nearly any live TV streaming service. Until now, the biggest hurdles were limited to the regular season — needing ESPN and Prime Video for nationally televised contests. Die-hard fans may opt for NFL RedZone or NFL Sunday Ticket, but those aren’t mandatory.

Contrast that to MLB, NFL, and NHL, all of which require a rat’s nest of regional sports networks, local affiliates, TV streaming services, or expensive TV packages to follow. The NFL’s simplicity has been key to its growth. If the league starts allowing a more fractured package, some frustrated fans will simply give up on streaming-exclusive games. Older fans, in particular, are liable to be angry with those changes.

While the NFL could surely make a killing by putting its marquee events behind a paywall, the fate of boxing should be a giant red flag. Boxing used to be enormously popular in the U.S., in part because of its easy availability on television. But the rise of pay-per-view events led the sport to choose a higher payday from a smaller audience. It’s a lucrative, but short-sighted decision.

Sports can only grow when young people have access to the games. The popularity of video games like Roblox and Minecraft has a lot to do with the fact that children can watch endless YouTube videos of gameplay online. How likely is it that a child in 2024 will know enough about boxing to ask his parent to break out the credit card to watch a match on PPV?

While it seems unlikely the NFL would ever charge a separate fee to watch a majority of its playoff games, the one-game Peacock experiment has already triggered audience backlash. And this is likely not the last time something like this will happen. What happens when fans miss out on an all-time classic game because of a paywall? The league risks alienating its fanbase by requiring more streaming services every year. While we understand the impulse to let media companies run wild, we hope the league keeps fans first.