To stream, or not to stream: what’s the NFL to do?
To stream, or not to stream: what’s the NFL to do?
Fans and politicians say they want the NFL to stay on broadcast TV. But from the league’s perspective, that arrangement won’t make sense forever.
It’s hard to think of the NFL, with its 32 billionaire owners and yearly eye-popping television ratings, as suffering from any hardships. But the league is stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment; on one side are angry politicians who have been stirred up by the league’s efforts to shift more games to streaming. On the other is the fact that broadcast TV is a dying medium, and the NFL is essentially the last programming keeping traditional TV afloat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a new study from Casino Guru shows that viewers are coming in on the side of the elected officials. Over 70% of NFL fans agree that the league is risking its popularity by shifting too many games to streaming, but the NFL doesn’t have a large number of additional options available.
The study shows that 90% of NFL Fans believe the league is prioritizing profits over fan experience, while 93% of respondents think the league has become too expensive to watch. With every new rights deal signed with a streaming service, that is one more subscription that a fan has to sign up for in order to watch all of the NFL content that, at one point, was found on linear broadcast and cable networks.
Additionally, 74% of those surveyed said that they either somewhat or strongly agreed with a statement made by President Donald Trump that the NFL risks “killing the golden goose” by putting more games on streaming platforms. Fifty-six percent said they thought all games should stay on free-to-air channels or cable networks, and 41% said they have become slightly less interested in watching games since the increase of streaming-exclusive contests.
Rising costs are pushing viewers to use alternative methods to access games. Over 50% of respondents said they had watched an NFL game at a bar, restaurant, or friend’s house in order to avoid paying for a game. Eighty-five percent of fans say they would prefer an NFL subscription service that offers all games in the same place for one lump-sum price.
To be sure, the NFL isn’t planning to simply dismiss these concerns. It can’t really afford to; Congress is pressing the league for accountability on the issue, raising questions of fan access and even threatening the league’s antitrust exemptions under the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act.
But from the league’s perspective, streaming is the best and most logical path to ensuring fan access to games in the future. The NFL isn’t going to simply stay on broadcast TV forever, especially since it’s essentially the last piece of programming propping linear TV up. Eighty-three of the top 100 television broadcasts in 2025 were NFL games, and it’s fair to wonder how long these channels would be able to draw a viable audience without live football games.
With that in mind, the NFL has to start thinking about how the next generation of fans will find its games. Pay TV clearly isn’t the answer, as cable draws even fewer viewership than broadcast TV does. That leaves streaming as essentially the only medium for the NFL to move to, no matter how unpopular it currently is with fans.
It’s also worth noting that, despite the data from Casino Guru, there hasn’t been any kind of large-scale fan revolt when it comes to streaming-only games. Viewers often grumble about having to find an NFL game on streaming, but eventually sign up for that service anyway. The ratings for “Thursday Night Football” are a case in point; when “TNF” switched to streaming-only for national audiences in 2022, it drew fewer than 10 million viewers per game. By 2025, those ratings had grown by 60% to over 15 million fans per game.
There’s also an important point that outraged politicians leave out of the equation when discussing streaming-exclusive NFL games. The league mandates that any games shown on streaming services also be available on broadcast TV channels in the home markets of the two teams playing, which negates the need to sign up for a new subscription if you live in the region where one of the teams is from.
To me, the issue of the NFL shifting games to streaming is essentially the same conversation that crops up any time a new technology is introduced. When the electric light was invented, there was no governmental interference to save the whale oil industry. Of course, whalers protested that they would have to adapt to the new order, just as traditional programmers like CBS and Fox are protesting the shift of NFL games to streaming and trying to convince fans to join them.
But from the NFL’s point of view, there aren’t a lot of other options to pursue. Broadcast TV won’t be around forever, at least not in the way it has been during the first century of television, and the league has tangible evidence that its audience will follow games to streaming, even if they’ll grumble a bit as they do so. That means that, despite the data from Casino Guru, outcry from fans, and threats from politicians, the NFL will continue to move games to streaming services in the future, and we are all going to have to get used to it.
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