Why is ESPN Sending Exclusive NFL Games to ESPN+ Despite Low Viewership?
Why is ESPN Sending Exclusive NFL Games to ESPN+ Despite Low Viewership?
This week’s Chargers vs. Cardinals game reportedly drew less than 2 million viewers, so why did ESPN make it a streaming-exclusive?
At first blush, ESPN doesn’t have a lot of reasons to feel good about the “Monday Night Football” game between the Los Angeles Chargers and Arizona Cardinals on Oct. 21. The 17-15 final score was bad enough, but now that viewership data is trickling out, things are only getting worse. The game was an ESPN+ exclusive, which goes a long way toward explaining why nearly nobody watched it, but the fact that less than 2 million fans tuned into the streamer for the game raises the question of why ESPN decided to make an “MNF” game a streaming exclusive in the first place. Clearly, Disney doesn’t make moves like this without a reason, so do the disappointing viewership numbers even matter in the company’s overall streaming strategy?
Key Details:
- The Chargers and Cardinals game on ESPN+ reportedly drew just 1.8 million viewers.
- ESPN likely wants to get viewers ready for a future when more and more games are streaming-only.
- Having data comparison points will be key for ESPN as it makes its content available to stream in more places.
Football talking heads and frustrated fans have bemoaned the ESPN+-exclusive game on Monday night, and as it turns out, they may have been the only ones who actually knew where to watch the contest. According to Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, the game attracted only 1.8 million viewers, the lowest known audience for any NFL game since 2008. That figure includes local audiences in Phoenix and Los Angeles who were allowed to watch the game on local channels.
To put those ratings even further into context, in 2023 “Thursday Night Football” games on Prime Video averaged 11.86 million viewers each, and even this figure is considered relatively low for an NFL game. NBCUniversal said after its Peacock-exclusive NFL Wild Card game in January that 23 million people had tuned in.
Those numbers suggest that streaming-only NFL games can have some success. That’s likely the simplest reason that ESPN thought it could try its hand at putting an “MNF” game on ESPN+; it thought it had enough brand recognition and loyal viewers to get away with it.
Indeed, ESPN+ had 24.8 million customers the last time it reported its subscriber totals publicly, which should have been more than enough to guarantee a larger audience than the game actually got. But putting the game up against another “MNF” game — the Baltimore Ravens and Tampa Bay Buccaneers — didn’t help; that contest got the lion’s share of viewers despite a staggered start time, pulling 16 million pairs of eyes.
Experimentation is Everything
The main reason I think that ESPN wanted to try out a streaming-exclusive “MNF” game under these circumstances is that the company wants to throw as much against the wall now to see what will stick in the future.
ESPN has some impressive streaming ambitions, and the fruits of those ambitions will soon be borne. To start, Disney has announced plans to embed an ESPN tile on Disney+ before the end of the year, allowing subscribers of that platform to stream select sporting events without adding ESPN+ to their Disney Bundle if they choose.
After that new venture into streaming comes an even bigger effort; ESPN plans to launch an entirely new streaming service before the start of the 2025 football season. This service is being called “Flagship” for now and will offer an experience much closer to sitting down and watching ESPN on TV than ESPN+ currently provides.
Moving so far into streaming comes with plenty of risks, and ESPN can mitigate some of those risks by arming itself with as much data as possible. Now it knows that even NFL games, which are consistently the highest-rated TV programs available, cannot draw large audiences when put exclusively on a streamer while another game — with arguably more interesting teams — is airing on a linear channel. They also know that the market share currently owned by ESPN+ isn’t enough to draw in the types of viewership that an NFL game normally receives.
Trying and failing at things is a proven method of getting better at them. The ratings for ESPN+’s exclusive “Monday Night Football” game between the Chargers and Cardinals prove that the experiment was a massive failure, but as long as ESPN applies those lessons it can do a better job of offering streaming-only NFL games when it begins providing more streaming options in the future.
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