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Last Monday, at his annual Super Bowl press conference, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked about the league’s experiments with streaming broadcasts. Specifically, he was asked why “a lot of fans were upset” about the exclusive broadcast of its Wild Card game between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs on Peacock last month (which I wrote about in “Peacock's NFL Wild Card DTC Lessons for CNN & ESPN”). Goodell responded that the NFL still has “over 90% of our games on free television” but:
“...our fans are on these platforms. Our fans want to access them. The technology is extraordinary. You can do things on some of these platforms that you can't do on a linear platform. So, for us it's part of the future. I don't know where it goes from here but we're going to continue to reach our fans where they are with the best possible production, the best possible technology.”
His answer implied the premise of the question was wrong. Enough fans have cut the cord that the test was necessary. If fans were unhappy—and, some fans were indeed unhappy—then why did the game reach 23 million viewers on Peacock, NFL+ and on NBC affiliates in Kansas City and Miami? And, why did it reach 27.6 million viewers overall on a platform that has struggled to climb past 30 million subscribers?
It is all progress, both incremental and speculative. The wholesale model which has delivered 90% of the NFL’s audience, to date, is now perceived to be facing an “extinction-level event”. But, the lesson from the NFL’s past season is the wholesale model is nowhere near disappearing. Goodell said in the same response that we will not see a streaming-only Super Bowl “in my lifetime”. The only certainty is that fans still exist, the challenge lies in reaching them and subscriptions may not be the ultimate solution.
Key Takeaway
For all the worrisome talk of “extinction events” in media, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s mindset is that NFL fandom is evolving and not disappearing. But, Goodell seems to worry most about the future of subscription models in sports media.
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Aggregating Audiences
Goodell’s sales pitch above mirrored something I wrote last December in “Mark Cuban Turns Skeptic On Sports Distribution Models”. An interview from April 2020 with Mark Cuban, the former principal owner and current minority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Cuban had predicted back then that content distribution models in sports would fragment given that distribution technology had evolved from “a bandwidth-constrained environment on paid TV to a non-bandwidth-constrained environment.” The solution was an “aggregate audience” across “four, five, six streams”.
A smaller version of that prediction played out last night with the main broadcast on (1) the CBS broadcast channel, (2) a separate, Spongebob Squarepants-themed broadcast on kids cable channel Nickelodeon and (3) the main broadcast also on Paramount+.
I concluded in December that the experiments Cuban predicted four years ago have produced results that are more safe than exciting for the NBA. The NFL's efforts with creators and multiple streams are more of a 50/50 mix of safe and exciting . Unlike the NBA and other sports leagues, it still is able to attract audiences at an enormous scale across platforms:
Amazon: Averaged 11.86 million for Thursday Night Football (up 24% year-over-year)
CBS: Averaged 19.35 million for overall coverage (up 5% year-over-year), averaged 24.64 million for late Sunday afternoon games, and had the season’s most-watched game with an average of 41.76 million for the Washington-Dallas game on Thanksgiving.
ESPN: Averaged 17.4 million for Monday Night Football (up 29% year-over-year).
Fox: Averaged 24.62 million for its America’s Game of the Week national broadcasts (up 2% year-over-year), but its NFL coverage was down 2% overall to 19 million.
NBC: Averaged 21.4 million for Sunday Night Football (up 8% year-over-year).
Reaching Fans
The NFL offers an apples-to-oranges comparison to the rest of the media marketplace. The majority of its demand is via broadcast TV, with the rest from cable and streaming. Its market category—live sports—is one of the few expected to survive, if not benefit from, the cord-cutting era. But, it is also learning that Gen Z media consumption is “more niche.” So, this Super Bowl weekend ended up being an important experiment for how the NFL both guarantees extraordinary scale for its broadcasts—Goodell predicted to reporters we will see 200 million people watch the Super Bowl—and builds out an insurance policy to ensure a similar scale of tune-in in the years to come.
The point that The New Yorker piece wrestled with—and the author focused on journalism with an acknowledgement of cable’s “similarly acute” problems (and three mentions of “sports”)—is “that it’s mostly consumers, not ads, who will need to pay for the services that outlets provide. Even supplemental revenue streams, such as concerts, literary festivals, and political talks, require a niche, devoted audience that is eager to engage with its favorite brands offscreen.”
This point is what makes Goodell’s statement—“I don't know where it goes from here but we're going to continue to reach our fans where they are with the best possible production, the best possible technology”—so notable. For all the worrisome talk of “extinction events”, Goodell’s mindset is that the fandom is evolving and not disappearing. The Information reported that the NFL also worked with “dozens” of creators over Super Bowl weekend to “turn more Gen Z viewers into football fans”. In addition, the league was “helping players themselves be creators”, sending them content for them to post on their own social media accounts. All 32 NFL teams have their own influencer strategies.
His point that we will not see a streaming-only Super Bowl “in my lifetime” implies he worries most about the future of subscription models in sports media. The marketplace challenge the NFL sees is less in losing broader audiences and more in losing audiences who pay a subscription. Peacock did extraordinarily well with its exclusive Wild Card game. Directionally, that success story suggested NFL streaming broadcasts should be a mix of Premium Video-On-Demand (PVOD) and monthly subscriptions.
Goodell doesn't seem to incline either way (yet). That said, the clearest signal is that the NFL’s future heavily relies on free access to the brand, whether on broadcast or YouTube, because that is where its fans are. Like the rest of the media marketplace, it remains wary of subscription models. But, being wary may be easier said than done with free broadcast TV driving 90% of the NFL's audience, and harder when it's newspaper, magazine and cable subscriptions driving the audience.