On Saturday night, NFL fans around the country will settle in for a star-studded first-round playoff game between the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and the slumping-but-dangerous Miami Dolphins. And some of those fans may flip on their televisions — as they’ve done for every NFL playoff game before this one — only to discover that even though NBC has been promoting the game, it isn’t on TV.
Instead, the game will air on Peacock, the network’s streaming service — a first for a league that has built its popularity around regular Sunday schedules and the accessibility of those games on broadcast and cable TV. An exclusively streamed playoff game represents another digital frontier crossed by America’s most popular sport.
“For us it remains really important … to increase our presences across digital,” Hans Schroeder, the chief operating officer of NFL Media, said during a conference call with reporters this week. “We see the evolution across the media landscape. We know increasingly younger fans are on different screens.”
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To make sure fans can find the game, NBC will heavily promote the Peacock broadcast earlier Saturday, during the traditionally broadcast game between the Cleveland Browns and Houston Texans. (In Kansas City and Miami, the game will be simulcast on local NBC affiliates.) NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said the company has contingency plans in place to handle the surge in viewership to Peacock.
The NFL has shown Thursday night games on Amazon’s Prime Video the past two seasons, but putting games on Peacock is a different animal in terms of availability. Peacock has 30 million subscribers; Prime Video has around 180 million.
That is precisely why NBC wants the NFL on Peacock. The network shelled out $110 million, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, for this game in addition to the around $1 billion it pays for its “Sunday Night Football” package. Customers will be able to pay $5.99 to sign up for Peacock, and NBC hopes they stick around.
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“There’s a little bit of a misconception that it’s pay-per-view for $6,” Cordella said. “We did this for a reason. It’s not just to get people to watch Saturday. It’s to get people to experience all the content across Peacock. This won’t be a success/failure on Sunday morning.”
There is no more popular entertainment program in the United States than the NFL, which makes it an expensive but potentially effective way to grow Peacock. The NFL accounted for 93 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts of 2023, according to Sportico. The NFL did its part as well, awarding Peacock a game that will feature marquee teams and arguably its biggest star, quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
NFL games averaged nearly 18 million viewers this season, Schroeder said, which is the second-highest total since tracking began in 1995. That represents an increase of 7 percent over last season.
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