Last month, an NFL playoff game was shown exclusively on a streaming service for the first time, and many football fans were understandably upset. How would they feel if a Super Bowl — arguably the largest one-day sporting event in the world — was only available on a streaming service in the near future?
With the apparent success of that streamed playoff game for Peacock, and the increasingly fractured nature of NFL broadcast rights – regular season games now appear on at least 10 different networks and platforms – it raises the question: will the Super Bowl soon only be available on a streaming service?
“That’s exactly where this is all headed,” Mark Vena, CEO and principal analyst at SmartTechResearch, a tech brand that analyzes and advises technology businesses, told MarketWatch. “It’s like a drug, people are going to push back against the cost of a drug but they are going to do it anyway.”
That’s saying a lot, since the Super Bowl has always been available to watch on a major television network.
Jacqueline Corbelli, CEO of BrightLine, a technology software company that specializes in television advertising, also thinks it could happen.
“I don’t think that’s beyond the realm of possibility because the NFL is showing a willingness to split up the broadcast rights across so many different distributors, and it opens up a bit of the Pandora’s box on all the ways you can actually deliver and price for the biggest sports event in the U.S.,” Corbelli said.
“Would the NFL hold the biggest sports event of the year hostage to the millions of Americans and fans globally that want to view the game in exchange for the highest bidder? You’d like to think that’s not a likely scenario, but given where we are in live sports content, you can’t count it out,” Corbelli added.
A large portion of NFL games nowadays are on streaming platforms. For example, Amazon
AMZN,
holds the rights to Thursday Night Football, and ESPN+ and Peacock had exclusive rights to some NFL games this year. Also, NFL’s Sunday Ticket package is now on YouTubeTV,
Of course, a streaming provider would have to be willing to spend a lot of money for the right to put a Super Bowl behind a paywall.
“The Super Bowl is so humongous it’s probably several billion dollars,” Vena said. “It would have to be.”
Why would a streaming service pay to broadcast a Super Bowl? Because it could make a lot of money from new subscribers, as well as ad revenue. A 30-second ad during the 2023 Super Bowl cost $7 million, for example.
Looking at the recent NFL playoff game that aired, Peacock paid $110 million to broadcast that game (and one regular season game), and says about three million people signed up for Peacock the weekend of the playoff game. MarketWatch spoke with experts to analyze how profitable that could end up being for Peacock.
Assuming a major streaming service would be willing to pay the price it would cost to host a Super Bowl on its platform, the NFL would likely only consider such a major move if it made financial sense.
“The NFL is a revenue-focused business model. It’s all about the money with the NFL,” Jim Willcox, senior electronics editor at Consumer Reports, told MarketWatch. “They would have to balance the loss of revenue that they would get from a broadcast partner paying for those rights compared to a streaming service paying for those rights.”
The game gets an enormous audience. The 2023 Super Bowl between the Chiefs and Eagles drew 113 million viewers, the third most-watched TV show ever.
See also: Here’s how long Peacock needs its 2.8 million new NFL-fan subscribers to stick around
The NFL would also need to decide if such a move would alienate fans, even the ones who are willing to pay for it.
If it does happen, a streaming service likely couldn’t broadcast a Super Bowl until at least 2032.
In 2021, the NFL and its partners, who include CBS, ESPN/ABC
DIS,
FOX
FOX,
NBC, and Amazon, signed an 11-year contract worth a total of $110 billion. Those rights are locked in, meaning that any major changes to the league’s Super Bowl, which rotates among the four main networks, would have to wait until after the deal expires.
Major digital broadcasters have been willing to pay hundreds of millions — even billions — for live sports rights in recent years. ESPN paid $1.4 billion to Spain’s La Liga to put soccer games on ESPN+, Apple
AAPL,
paid $2.5 billion for exclusive rights to Major League Soccer matches, and just last month Netflix
NFLX,
paid $5 billion for 10 years of WWE’s “Raw.”
“It feels wrong in a sense that a game with that sort of mainstream Americana would then be limited to those people who could afford to watch it,” Willcox said about the Super Bowl. “I think it would be injurious to the reputation of the NFL.”
The NFL hasn’t responded to MarketWatch’s request for comment.
Of course, not everyone thinks this is likely to happen.
Leigh Steinberg, a superagent for numerous NFL athletes including the Super Bowl-bound Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, told MarketWatch that undercutting the NFL’s network broadcast partners with a streaming service could be “self-destructive.”
“If the Super Bowl broadcast ever resembled other pay-per-view entertainments, it would create a one-time financial bonanza for the NFL,” he said. “But since not all fans can afford what that charge would be, it would eventually erode the size of the viewing audience.”
The Kansas City Chiefs square off against the San Francisco 49ers on Feb. 11 at 6:30 p.m. EST. The game will be broadcast simultaneously on CBS and Paramount+
PARA,
as well as a separate kids-centric broadcast on Nickelodeon featuring the characters from SpongeBob.
