The NFL media monster is expanding for the 2025 season, which begins with Thursday night’s opener between the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles and the rival Dallas Cowboys.
That NFC East showdown will be broadcast nationally on NBC, but football fanatics who want to keep up with all the action this season will need 10 streaming services.
Professional football has been the nation’s dominant television force for years as viewing behaviors shift to asynchronous streaming options. To keep up, everybody wants a piece of the NFL pie.
For the second consecutive year, the NFL has opted to host an international game in Brazil on the first Friday of the season. The league gave YouTube the broadcast rights for this year’s game.
Fans across the country will need to pull up the streamers on their laptops or download an app on their televisions to watch the Los Angeles Chargers take on the Kansas City Chiefs in Sao Paulo.
“Everything we do, we’re thinking across all our partners in the entirety of our distribution to make sure we’re growing the overall pie,” Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, said Tuesday.
“On top of that, we need to continue to evolve with the landscape around us. And we know our fans are increasingly spending more time on digital.”
The league could be approaching critical mass for digital-only broadcasts. Once again, a pair of Christmas Day games will be exclusive to Netflix. Prime Video still holds the “Thursday Night Football” package, along with a Black Friday matchup featuring the Eagles and the Chicago Bears.
Peacock, the streaming service owned by NBCUniversal, will have an exclusive offering in late December.
NFL Network still holds rights to the ever-expanding international slate, with a handful of games slated for 9:30 a.m. on Sundays.
The bulk of the NFL’s offerings — 202 of the league’s 272 regular-season games — will still air on Fox and CBS, the longtime partners holding Sunday afternoon rights. Every game in a team’s local market will also be available “over the air” for anyone handy enough to put a digital antenna on their TV.
A growing number of games, 20 this season, will be exclusive to streaming services for most of the country.
The influx of broadcast partners complicates the viewing experience. It used to be simple, with rare exceptions.
Fox and CBS had Sunday afternoon games, NBC held the Sunday night rights, and ESPN was the home of “Monday Night Football.”
The weekly broadcast schedule isn’t as cut-and-dried anymore, forcing the NFL to be proactive in its messaging.
“We think adding choice and availability for our fans is a win for the fans, but what we always want to make sure we do is we’re telling our fans all the different ways and how they can watch,” Mr. Schroeder said. “We’re clear about when and where the games are and what platforms they’re on.”
Every NFL broadcast now features a series of bumpers throughout the action between commercial breaks. A simple graphic displays the games scheduled for the week, their start times and the platform hosting the broadcast.
More money, more problems
Lisa Delpy Neirotti, director of the sports management program at George Washington University, suggested that the expansion may once have been seen as an opportunity to make games easier for fans to access.
“I think it turned into more of a money grab. With all the different competition between these different platforms, I feel they realized the value of doing these one-offs and giving different platforms a piece of the NFL action,” she said. “They’re leaving money on the table if they don’t slice and dice.”
The bare minimum for a cable-cutting customer to watch every NFL game this season has now surpassed $500 annually. The simplest way for viewers without cable to tune in is to use YouTube TV for local broadcasts and “NFL Sunday Ticket” for out-of-market games on Sunday afternoons.
For returning users, that package now costs $480. Adding the popular RedZone channel, which features every scoring play live on Sundays, raises the price to $522.
At minimum, a dedicated fan must shell out $11 monthly to catch Peacock’s exclusive game, $8 for Netflix in December, and $45 for five months of Prime Video to watch “Thursday Night Football” and the Black Friday game.
These estimates are based on the cheapest, ad-supported packages and assume viewers will pay for only one month. Most consumers subscribe for longer.
Nearly 90% of games are still airing on traditional broadcast networks: NBC, ABC, Fox and CBS. Only 6% of games are reserved for cable, and another 7% are dedicated to streamers.
That distribution itself isn’t terrible for fans. It’s the nature of the spread — with a pair of games on Netflix, a Friday game on YouTube, Black Friday on Prime Video, Sunday morning matchups on NFL Network — that could confuse viewers.
“They have to be careful because there are a lot of fans who are being priced out or confused by all of these different platforms,” Ms. Delpy Neirotti said. “How much are people willing to spend to watch football?”
NFL officials view their partnerships from a different angle. Mr. Schroeder insisted that the league is selective about what platforms receive exclusive games to reach viewers “where they are.”
“When you look at where we’ve gone on digital, we’ve gone on to platforms that are already highly scaled with a wide reach already,” he said, noting the near-ubiquity of Netflix and YouTube in households nationwide.
Loss leaders
Some NFL fans are willing to pay whatever it costs to follow the league. Ms. Delpy Neirotti called it “recession-proof.”
“People will stick with sports even when times are tough,” she said, noting shifting economic conditions. “We’re going to have to make some decisions. Maybe they’ll go to bars or be creative in the ways they share things and invite people over. ‘I’ve got the Prime Video, you’ve got Netflix.’”
Data has repeatedly shown that fans will sign up for a streaming service just to catch a game.
In January 2024, countless NFL lovers groused and grumbled that a wild-card playoff game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins was reserved for Peacock.
Digital analytics firm Antenna reported that Peacock added 2.8 million subscribers in the three days leading up to the game, making it “the single biggest subscriber acquisition moment ever measured” at the time.
“For my neighbors, who are all 50 years old or older, they said, ‘I’m not doing this. That’s crazy,’” Ms. Delpy Neirotti said of the Peacock playoff game. “You know what they did? They got the subscription.”
For platforms airing the games, the NFL’s dominant ratings aren’t the only benefit. The broadcasts also attract captive viewers into their ecosystem. For example, the first show after the Super Bowl is typically one of the most-watched non-sports broadcasts of the year.
Streamers and networks are still capitalizing on NFL popularity to advertise their offerings: sports and otherwise.
“You can call it a loss leader or a hook, but they use the NFL games as a way to showcase other shows. Historically, ‘60 Minutes’ grew in popularity because it followed the CBS Sunday football game,” Ms. Delpy Neirotti said.
Peacock may have been the biggest success story so far. The service spent much of its 2024 postseason broadcast reminding viewers that it would host the 2024 Paris Olympics. With another marquee event on the horizon, subscribers kept paying for the service during the intervening months.
“In addition to getting subscriptions, they are also using the broad base and passionate base of sports audiences to market their other shows,” she said. “Even if it’s only one game a week or one game a season, they can still leverage that to market their other shows on their platform.”
For the NFL, turning these one-off broadcasts into streaming events is an opportunity to convert fans. A Beyonce halftime show enticed music lovers to tune in for a football game on Christmas Day.
The league plans similar programming for its games in Sao Paulo and Dublin, airing on YouTube and NFL Network, respectively. This game plan has made the Super Bowl, with its water-cooler-dominating commercials and halftime show, a cross-cultural phenomenon.
NFL officials said Tuesday that they don’t have a limit in mind on the number of broadcast partners, but they’re running out of games to offer.
Fox and CBS are owed a set amount of Sunday afternoon games, and the league noted that it won’t have a Friday game during Week 1 of the 2026 season.
The only current offering left for sale would be the international slate of 9:30 a.m. games that air on NFL Network on Sundays throughout the season.
“At some point, we’re almost leveraged out. There’s only so many ways you can splice it,” Ms. Delpy Neirotti said. “Except if somebody steps up and says, ‘I’ll pay XYZ for this.’ I don’t think the NFL is ever going to turn away a large amount of money if they can put it into the schedule somehow.”
This season will be a stress test for NFL saturation, starting with Thursday’s opener on NBC and Friday’s Sao Paulo game on YouTube.
• Liam Griffin can be reached at lgriffin@washingtontimes.com.