The NFL Refuses To Be Commoditized By Sports Streamer

After last week’s big news that Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery would join forces for a sports streaming app, TVREV (specifically, me) posited that it could flatten sports streaming rights, and maybe put a stop to astronomical price increases to televise those events.

Of course, in the limited time since, ESPN committed to a six-year, $7.8 million deal to keep College Football Playoff rights. And in a separate note, Puck’s John Ourand reported that the NFL has already enlisted its legal team to see if it has an out from appearing on the forthcoming super sports streamer.

For ESPN, the opportunity to sell rights to specific games is interesting because it could either recoup money without losing out (via selling an all-Big Ten game — that will appear on the same app — to Fox), or just flip things over to NBC/CBS as it sees fit.

For the NFL, however, the move indicates a clear line in the sand between how that league operates, compared to the approach of the rest of the U.S. sports properties.

Following a season where the NFL grew its already massive ad footprint (by 15%, according to iSpot), found new fans via Taylor Swift interest, and dove even further into streaming… the league is starting realize that it doesn’t necessarily “need” U.S. media companies as much as they need it.

So for a Fox-ESPN-WBD super-streamer, having the NFL as a tile during the fall and winter becomes the app’s biggest draw. And even without CBS and NBC games, Fox and ESPN games could potentially be enough of an enticement — especially at the right price — for fans to accept missing the other games. Or at the very least, completely bail on cable/satellite to an extent that could start cutting into how much ads and game rights are worth for networks.

Even without that potential drain on cable/satellite audiences, there’s also the basic fact that the NFL is TV’s biggest program, and anyone that has rights to those games has an automatic advantage, and a way to upcharge subscribers. The NFL’s not opposed to streaming. It has its own app (NFL+), weekly games on Amazon Prime Video, a YouTube TV deal for Sunday Ticket, and even had a Peacock-exclusive playoff game this year.

The key difference in those cases, however, is that the NFL knew its live games would be featured heavily, and be used to drive subscriptions and audience in advance. Here, this is a new venture that will now use the NFL to grow out of the box, without the NFL signing on first. There’s a way that all gets mitigated by simply having the partners pay more money to make it happen. But there’s also a chance that no amount of money will balance out the feeling that the NFL will be commoditized on a super sports streamer in a way that would not occur on standalone apps like Paramount+, Peacock or Amazon Prime Video, or even Fox Sports Go and the WatchESPN app.

This commoditization isn’t unique to the NFL, but it’s uniquely a problem for the NFL. For the NBA, MLB and NHL (and college sports leagues as well), there are advantages to commoditization that expand audiences, allow them to become a greater part of the passive viewing experience in the country and make them part of the larger cultural conversation. MLS, for instance, would kill for this sort of dynamic and has lost aspects of it while sitting on Apple TV+. The Premier League gets commoditized on Peacock and benefits from it.

Those leagues aren’t sitting on top of the country’s sports and entertainment mountain, though, while the NFL is. And as such, the NFL does not want or need to be placed on a tile side-by-side with other sports programming. Because it doesn’t see itself as something that exists side-by-side with other sports programming. Or any programming, for that matter.

Audience and advertising data proves as much, during the Super Bowl or any other point on the calendar. And as the NFL starts to lean more heavily into that dynamic, perhaps we’re now reaching a point where the league starts to believe it can just exist without these networks, via NFL+ and/or YouTube TV and Amazon.

Networks, after all, can’t really pay for whatever the NFL will deem its value is the next time media rights are negotiated. So even if it doesn’t happen overnight, we could be reaching the point where the league simply grows beyond what legacy TV entities can offer it.