At $111 billion over 11 years, the NFL’s media rights deal is the biggest in the U.S. That deal has an out clause after the 2028-29 season with all of its media partners except Disney (which can opt out one year later).
Sources tell me the opt-out also affects “Sunday Ticket,” the league’s out-of-market package for which Alphabet’s YouTube paid about $2 billion. That means that after the 2029 Super Bowl, the NFL has the right to completely rejigger the media landscape, if it so chooses.
Five years is a lifetime in the media industry given the rapid pace of change. To put that timeframe in perspective, if you rewind five years from today, Disney+, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, Paramount+ and Max (formerly known as HBO Max) all hadn’t launched. Now they have more than 300 million subscribers combined.
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But it’s not too early to start thinking about what 2029 symbolizes. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say 2029 could be the end of the modern media era. It’s at least plausible that by that time, streaming has become so dominant that the NFL feels comfortable moving some Sunday afternoon packages away from broadcast TV, especially given the superior balance sheets and potential global reach of companies such as Netflix, Google, Apple and Amazon.
Let me be clear: The evidence today suggests the NFL won’t do this. TV ratings for football on CBS, Fox and NBC look great. CBS’s Week 2 Bengals-Chiefs matchup was the most-watched September NFL game since 1998 with nearly 28 million viewers. NFL games last year were 93 of the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts.
But I also know that some legacy media executives are already thinking about 2029 and brainstorming internally about how they can afford to compete against the tech giants for NFL games. The ideas range from the incremental (a third Sunday afternoon package) to the radical: What if the NFL replaced Sunday Ticket with a college model where every game had a national audience?
It’s not totally absurd. Local market broadcasting rules are simultaneously important to the league and increasingly anachronistic. Technology is no longer the issue. Streaming services can host multiple games at the same time. If there are enough bidders for packages of games, the league could conceivably make more money by selling packages to many media partners than it could by sticking with the Sunday Ticket model, which nearly cost the league $4.7 billion in damages when a jury decided it ran amok of antitrust law. (A judge bailed out the NFL by throwing out that verdict last month.)
On the flip side, having multiple games compete against each other nationally may end up being less lucrative to media companies and the league. YouTube pays about $2 billion per year for Sunday Ticket in its current deal. It’s a very complicated analysis, but it’s almost certainly one the NFL will examine.
“It’s such a good thought exercise,” said MoffettNathanson’s Robert Fishman. “If this is a different way to leverage broadcast networks’ important broader national reach while keeping local availability in place, then it’s worth the analysis.”
The NFL hasn’t been shy about inviting many partners under the tent. Beyond YouTube, the NFL has partnered with Netflix to carry Christmas games for the next three years. Amazon pays the league about $1 billion per year to carry Thursday Night Football.
The league wants tech partners and the league wants broadcast partners. The NBA, in its most recent rights deal, only wanted three media packages to help with consumer confusion and subscription fatigue.
But the NFL doesn’t appear to have the same concerns. The NFL has already put games exclusively on Amazon Prime and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and ratings have remained strong.
Given how popular NFL games are versus everything else on TV, the architecture of the NFL rights is the single biggest decision in the American media industry. It’ll be a topic that looms over the biggest media and entertainment decisions of the next five years.
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