The NFL wants more money. That means 2026 was already set to be an interesting year in the world of sports media. Now that Paramount Skydance isset to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, things could get even more interesting.
Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS, controls half of the NFL’s Sunday afternoon inventory for now. Boy, they have had to write a lot of checks lately, though. With new deals set to be discussed and signed, it’s not crazy to think those Sunday afternoon over-the-air packages are about to get meaningfully smaller. Fox has problems of its own.Bank of America has all but guaranteed that the network will be giving up games from the Sunday afternoon package it controls.
Streaming exclusives were already on the rise in the NFL. International games, Thursday nights, Black Friday, Christmas Day. If you are an NFL completist, the four major networks and ESPN just aren’t enough anymore. The number of games skipping linear television is onlybound to go up in the league’s next deal.
In the US, more television is consumedvia streaming services than linear networks. People know how they work. Your 70-something parent can find their ER episodes on Hulu. Your four-year-old toddler knows how to find Bluey on Disney+.
These services are ubiquitous. So why do people lose their minds when sports are involved?
I get it. The NBA used to be on just two channels. If there wasn’t a game on ESPN that night, there was one on TNT. Now, the game could be on ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, or Prime Video. Inside the NBA is an ESPN thing now, but really it’s not. Also, it’s not as good as it used to be. I get the rage.
What I don’t get is people pretending they don’t know how to find the game they are trying to watch.Charles Barkley and Michael Wilbon get paid a lot of money. I bet they can afford a smartphone. Those things put access to all of the recorded knowledge in human history right in your pocket. Surely they can be used to find out where a game is on!
It’s classic performative boomer victimhood from Barkley and Wilbon. Will the loud complaining change things in the NBA?Probably not. Will it even be considered by the NFL? No, because, with all due respect, the NBA ain’t the NFL. Nothing is.
Keeping up with everything in any sport is expensive now. It’s certainly more expensive than it was ten years ago. That’s the premise behindthe FCC’s inquiry into the effects of streaming deals on sports fans. But the premise is faulty. Brendan Carr and his staff are either uninformed, incompetent, or just playing make-believe.
I’m old enough to remember the introduction of products like Sunday Ticket, League Pass, and whatever the hockey and baseball versions of an out-of-market TV package are called. They have never been free, and without them, viewers had very limited access. Keeping up with everything in any sport HAS ALWAYS BEEN EXPENSIVE!
This is basic capitalism. In a world where almost no one is watching live television, the NFL brings people to their TVs. It’s our one and only monoculture in this country. That’s worth big money, and tech companies have more of it than broadcasters do.
Financial uncertainty at Fox and CBS could open the door for a real revolution in how we watch football on Sundays. While it’s unlikely these impending negotiations will end with most games being streaming exclusives, the idea isn’t far-fetched. Hell, talk of a streaming exclusive Super Bowlisn’t going away any time soon.
These ideas persist not just because the NFL knows its suitors will find the money to get a deal done. Elon Musk has more money than anyone. He could write a check tomorrow that would be big enough for NFL owners to at least consider making every single game available only on those iPads inside of Tesla dashboards. That will never happen, though, because in addition to riches, the NFL also wants a stranglehold on American culture. It needs to keep its games easily accessible to everyone, and streaming platforms are easily accessible.
Stranger Things, The Pitt, and The Traitors became popular for a reason. Streaming is just TV to most people now. If they are looking for something, they can find it.
These deals are not going away. The NFL is only going to offer the companies with the deepest pockets more and more games, and other leagues will surely follow.