EverPass has announced a rights deal enabling it to distribute all the NFL’s digital-only game broadcasts to bars and restaurants for the 2025 season, beginning with Friday’s YouTube exclusive stream of the Los Angeles Chargers-Kansas City Chiefs game in Brazil.
The company renewed existing agreements with Netflix for its Christmas games, Prime Video for Thursday Night Football and the Black Friday game, and Peacock for its exclusive matchup in late December.
EverPass acts as a complimentary service for commercial businesses that show sports through existing relationships with cable and satellite companies. The streaming exclusives come in addition to the company’s primary offering as the distributor for NFL Sunday Ticket.
By providing the digital-only games, EverPass CEO Alex Kaplan said that it helps bar owners avoid the problem of switching between different apps or worse yet, using illegal means to show games to their patrons.
“Where you and I can go turn on the TV and flip from app to app, that is a nightmare for bars and restaurants,” Kaplan said in a video interview. “They’re not set up to switch from an app. So what we’ve started to be able to do is not only provide access to Sunday Ticket and Peacock’s Sports Pass but start to aggregate all these particular NFL games that are hard for those guys to get a hold of.”
The NFL flipped the consumer version of Sunday Ticket to YouTube TV in a seven-year, $14 billion deal ahead of the 2023 season. DirecTV still retains the commercial package that EverPass distributes. EverPass also carries Peacock Sports Pass from Comcast/NBCUniversal, which brings commercial businesses access to NBC Sports’ offerings, which will include the NBA this coming fall.
Most recently, EverPass expanded its commercial distribution agreement with Prime Video to go beyond Thursday Night Football, giving bars and restaurants access to the streamer’s coverage of the NBA, WNBA, NWSL, NASCAR, Premier Boxing Champions, the ONE Championship and the New York Yankees for patrons in the NYC metropolitan area.
It remains difficult to measure how many people watch games from bars. Nielsen expanded its out-of-home measurement panel in the fall of 2020, and the NFL has been the biggest beneficiary of the OOH boost, with its Thanksgiving games garnering ratings not seen since the mid-1990s.
Yet the NFL said Tuesday that Nielsen still has gaps in its OOH measurement even as the insights firm transitions to its Big Data + Panel methodology to capture viewing from multiple devices. EverPass agrees with the league that tracking viewership at bars and restaurants remains a work in progress.
“In our perspective, we’ve always thought that that out-of-home has been undercounted, and we’d love to help be part of that solution,” EverPass chief marketing officer Bryan Icenhower said. “We can start [to] get a lot better [at] understanding what’s the true value of that viewership. It’s off, but we think with the data coming in and interfacing with what the bar already has in their point-of-sale systems, we can get a lot better.”
EverPass is the brainchild of the NFL’s venture capital arm 32 Equity and RedBird Capital Partners. It has handled commercial distribution of the league’s games since launching in March 2023. TKO Group Holdings, which owns WWE and UFC, became a strategic investor in EverPass in July 2024.