The year is 2045. The fourth week of February. After 21 grueling weeks of the regular season and five rounds of the playoffs, the Super Bowl has been decided: the Buffalo Bills vs. the London Jaguars. The NFL expects 130 million viewers to watch the game on Netflix, the exclusive home of the Super Bowl after the NFL signed a multibillion-dollar deal with the league through 2040.
Those who don’t subscribe to the streaming service can pay $149 for a one-month trial, which includes access to the game via one of Netflix’s 10 Megacast Super Bowl broadcasts. A popular Megacast option is the Legends Room, where retired players Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and CJ Stroud can interact live with the audience while watching games. Adam Amin, Greg Olsen and Laura Rutledge will call the game on Netflix’s main NFL channel.
Sound far-fetched? Maybe that was 10 years ago. While the thought exercise of building the NFL into a pay-per-view event is nothing new, what is new is the era we live in. The NFL playoffs, which premiered live exclusively on Peacock last month, felt like a shocking moment.
Peacock spent $110 million to broadcast the Kansas City Chiefs’ 26-7 victory over the Miami Dolphins in the AFC wild-card round in an attempt to boost its 30 million subscribers. Antenna, a research firm that tracks streaming data, estimated that Peacock had 2.8 million registered users during the three-day period for the wild-card game, with an average of 23 million viewers. This is Antenna’s biggest user acquisition moment ever.
Is a Super Bowl paywall inevitable for the next 40 years or so?
“Considering the disconnection rate is over 7 percent, or 5 million households disappearing every year, the odds are very good that the Super Bowl will be played on a streaming platform in ‘our’ lifetime,” said MoffettNathanson, founder and senior managing director of research firm MoffettNathanson. Manager, which provides trends in media, communications and technology to institutional investors.
NFL officials have repeatedly said the league is committed to televising and broadcasting games widely. NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder told reporters last month, including Competitor“You can’t reach 190 million people in a year if your content isn’t very widespread, and that’s always been our cornerstone. … Every one of our games is on broadcast TV, at least That’s true in their markets, and probably 90% of our games have broadcast as their core platform. For us, that’s still very important.”
Longtime CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus, who is retiring later this year, noted that such conversations won’t happen until current NFL media rights expire. occur. The league’s media rights agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon are worth approximately $110 billion and run through the 2033 season.
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“There’s nothing to worry about right now,” McManus said. “(NFL Commissioner) Roger Goodell has been very candid in saying that broad distribution is part of the reason for the NFL’s success. Yes, the NFL has some games on Peacock, including a playoff game. … But when there are 5,600 When tens of thousands of people watch the AFC Championship Game (on CBS), it’s a huge success story. I can’t speak for whether it makes business sense for Netflix, Amazon, or Apple to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a playoff game, but I do know Linear television is extremely important to the success of the NFL.”
Like McManus, David Levy, the former president of Turner Sports and current co-CEO of sports marketing agency and consulting firm Horizon Sports & Experiences, believes the Super Bowl will Continues to air on free-to-air television. The next few years.
“Broadcast and free-to-air broadcasting are still the largest media,” Levy said. “You’re always building up the next generation of fans who want this place to have the greatest impact. Thirty years from now? I can’t answer that question because I don’t know who’s going to be the commissioner of the NFL and who’s going to have that.” team.”
Levy is very positive about NFL products appearing on streaming services. But he made an important point: Any streaming service dedicated to showing the Super Bowl would need its own production capabilities and enough proof-of-concept for the production elements to give the NFL the confidence to put its most important property in their hands. Netflix or Apple don’t currently have this capability.
“Everyone wants to turn on their network TV to watch the Super Bowl,” said NFL sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson, who covers Sunday’s game for CBS. “I think you alienate people who can’t watch. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more playoff games there, but I think when it comes to the Super Bowl, it’s about how many eyeballs there are and making sure all Everyone can watch it.”
The Super Bowl behind a streaming paywall seems far-fetched. But a decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine a playoff game between the Chiefs and Dolphins taking place at a stadium called the Peacock. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
William Mao, senior vice president of global media rights at sports and entertainment agency Octagon, believes it’s unlikely we’ll see the Super Bowl aired exclusively on streaming services in the United States in the next 20 to 25 years if it’s free. – Over-the-air TV penetration (still greater than any single subscription VOD base). He said his answer would only change when (or if) subscriber capacity for paywall streaming approaches today’s free-to-air TV penetration.
“As long as the Super Bowl remains the most-watched live television program, it will remain free-to-air in some form,” Mao predicted. “With more than 100 million viewers in a single broadcast, that’s still a lot for a dedicated paywall.” With so much advertising appeal, all signs point to Super Bowl ratings and ad rates continuing to rise through its current distribution.
“Is there going to be a situation in the future where some other factor takes the Super Bowl away from the championship? Never say never, of course. But the gap between the No. 1 and No. 2 most-watched show in the U.S. right now is over 60 million viewers. So. Why would the NFL undermine its own dominant and extremely profitable position?”
Mao noted that the Super Bowl is unique in that it attracts a large casual audience. People watch games for a variety of reasons, including commercials and halftime musical performances. He wondered whether top musical acts would continue to perform halftime shows at a reduced cost if broadcasts were paid and not guaranteed to draw the same crowds. There would also be some interest in Congress if the NFL went down this path.
This discussion feels even more relevant in 2024 thanks to Peacock Gaming. We don’t know how many of the new subscribers will stick with Peacock long-term, and the game isn’t 100% exclusively streaming, as it appears on free-to-air TV in Kansas City and Miami. But the NFL is putting one of its premium inventory games behind a paywall.
“The Peacock data is reliable, and the broadcast provides an informative reference point for future similarly distributed NFL games,” Mao said. “For example, will a 40% reduction in ad load become the norm for streaming games? But there’s still a lot going on between moving one of the many wildcard games to streaming versus moving the biggest game of the year. In my opinion “The Super Bowl should be one of the last fully paywalled events in the NFL’s portfolio.”
It’s not easy to come up with a price point for Super Bowl pricing behind a paywall. Is there a cap on the most popular public television experience Americans (and nearly 9 million Canadians) have each year? Back to the hypothetical theme of this article: Let’s say Netflix gets 30 million new sign-ups for the Super Bowl experience at $149. This equates to nearly $4.5 billion. This does not include advertising revenue. There will definitely be a significant loss of subscribers after the Super Bowl, but there will also be some people who continue to use the product and then pay the annual subscription fee.
“I don’t think the issue is the price point of the individual games,” Mao said. “If the Super Bowl wants to have an exclusive streaming future, it’s more likely to first become part of a broader set of rights.”
When I asked Nathanson about the pricing point, he said it was difficult to come up with a clear number.
“That’s a great question,” Nathanson said. “How many people are paying $6 for a pay-per-view wild card game on Peacock? It’s obviously going to be multiples of that.”
It’s unlikely we’ll see the NFL go down this path in the short or medium term. But ask yourself, back in 2014, did you imagine having to pay to watch the NFL playoffs.
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• What if Taylor Swift was in attendance to watch Travis Kelce and the Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers, CBS Sports’ 58th The challenge for the Super Bowl production team was how to incorporate the singer’s image into the broadcast. I talked to previous Super Bowl producers about this.
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• For those interested in how Beat reporters cover Super Bowl teams, I created a 40-minute podcast with Nate Taylor, who covers the Chiefs game Competitor. Tim Kawakami, CompetitorA Bay Area columnist who has been writing about the 49ers for years will be Tuesday’s guest.
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(CBS Super Bowl 58 promotional display outside the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
