The NFL has “always wielded enormous power over the entertainment conglomerates,” but now that power “is dwarfing everything else in Hollywood,” according to Matthew Belloni of PUCK. The league’s current broadcast partners together “pay more than” $10B per year in rights deals that “rents the most consistently popular programming on TV, but it also represents a decent chunk of those broadcasters’ overall content budgets.” Now the NFL “wants -- and will almost certainly get -- more.” Research firm MoffettNathanson predicted that the average annual value of NFL rights deals “will rise to” $15.9B after renegotiations -- including the “carve-outs of additional smaller packages, likely to sell to Netflix or YouTube.” That is 58% “higher” than the current deals. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said this week on Fox News that he is “looking into” the antitrust exemption that allows the NFL to do league-wide TV deals “only if it protects customer access.” If the league continues to “shift games from ‘free’ TV to paywalled streaming services, Carr might pounce.” Belloni writes the NFL is “basically the only thing propping up these linear networks,” and carriage fees are “stalled or even declining, thus making football more valuable and less affordable for their owners” (PUCK, 4/3).
POWER PLAY: A WALL STREET JOURNAL editorial stated that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is “using the threat of an early opt-out provision” to “change the terms only halfway through the deals.” The assumption is that he “thinks he can get more money from big tech’s streaming services than he can from his long-time TV partners.” That would “hurt the networks, especially local stations, that rely on the NFL for ad revenue.” The NFL “may have the power to squeeze the networks,” but the question “then becomes why the league would deserve an antitrust exemption.” But if the NFL no longer wants that deal, and it would “prefer to squeeze fans for more money while broadcasters are hollowed out, then Congress might consider whether that 1961 antitrust exemption has ceased to make sense.” Let us “hear the NFL explain why it still deserves it” (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 4/1).
HAS LEGS: USA TODAY’s Jarrett Bell noted NFL Media EVP & COO Hans Schroeder “hails” the NFL’s traditional model, which resulted in 88% of the games on broadcast TV, 100% for the home markets of the participating teams, yet the footprint with streaming will “only continues to grow while the league can eye opting out of its current media deals after the 2029 season.” Schroeder said, “We know our fans are spending time on those other platforms and we want to be there, too.” With the numbers the “highest in a decade” for the 2-to-17 and 18-to-34 age demographics, per Schroeder, the link between younger viewers and streaming “is palatable” (USA TODAY, 4/2).