NFL, Rebundling Shows Netflix Has Already Won Streaming Wars
The streaming wars, as silly as the concept may seem, are effectively over.
You could’ve called declared the conflict complete at various points before. But after last week’s news double-whammy, it’s official: Netflix won. And now comes the part where everyone reckons with that fact.
As Alan Wolk already covered in this space, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney will offer a bundle — in part indicating defeat trying to compete against Netflix alone (something both already admitted when they started bundling their own separate services together as it is).
The other moment, of course, sits within John Ourand’s reporting over at Puck — that Netflix is likely to carry two Christmas Day NFL games this year.
Though it’s no surprise that the NFL’s desire to hack its TV deal into increasingly lucrative bits led to adding yet another partner, the fact that it’s Netflix is the stunner. Netflix, after all, had limited experience with live programming or sports just a couple years ago. And even now, “live” is still not what Netflix’s calling card is — these past few weekends of Tom Brady roasts and enjoyably weird John Mulaney talk shows be damned.
But in a reality where the NFL is always looking to strike the balance between incredible exposure and incredible profits, the league opting to partner with Netflix means the streamer has inspired enough faith in its live events to date, was willing to offer up a boatload of cash, AND is seen by the NFL as the best way to get those games in front of the largest TV audience.
The weeks and months to follow upfronts, when all of these things are announced officially, will provide a better sense of just how heated these negotiations were and who Netflix was bidding against. One might assume existing NFL partner Amazon was involved, and perhaps the possible NBA deal took Prime Video out of the running. And surely CBS, Fox and NBC were all interested as well, lacking the Christmas Day NBA slate ESPN already has.
But on a very noisy day on the TV calendar and in this increasingly fractured media environment, Netflix still reportedly triumphed over all of those would-be suitors.
How? Because Netflix has already won the battle for eyeballs and appears ready to evolve into an even larger player with that victory in-hand.
This doesn’t mean that TV is now a Netflix-centered monolith. No, far from that. There’s no reality where TV can ever go back to just a handful of destination points controlling what audiences are watching at all times.
What it means instead is that Netflix is the most likely home to streaming’s biggest shows and events — and probably watch-time, too. That matters for advertisers, and it already matters for talent. In an environment of rapidly escalating subscription costs, it already matters to many consumers. And now, sports is starting to come around to the idea as well that Netflix is the most direct (but not the only) way to deliver your product to a large audience.
Even as that idea is believed right now, the TV industry’s full response to the information will only start rounding into shape after audience ratings arrive following those NFL games on Christmas.
If the games — regardless of which teams play in them — put up numbers far surpassing Amazon’s typical Thursday Night figures, then expect this engagement to continue for future Christmas Days while Netflix puts a feather in its cap to significantly expand its roster of live sporting events. Even if the audience comes in close to/slightly below Amazon’s Thursdays, it’s still a win given the distractions of Christmas and the NBA’s own block of premium sports inventory the same day.
And that’s the thing here: Barring significant technical issues for the duration of the games, this is a no-lose situation for the NFL. And that’s a commentary on how much faith Netflix is able to inspire at this point. That means they’ve won. Now we get to see what they do with that victory.
