As the NFL faces pressure from an ongoing Justice Department investigation into its media rights practices, it seems the league will try and assuage some concerns this upcoming season.
Next season’s NFL schedule will reportedly include “a slight increase in its broadcast footprint from last year,” according to a report by CNBC’s Alex Sherman on Thursday. The decision comes amid both the Justice Department probe and an inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), both of which are looking into whether the NFL is holding up its end of the bargain regarding the antitrust exemption the league is afforded under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
In recent months, FCC chairman Brendan Carr has questioned whether the exemption, which allows the NFL to pool media rights between teams to sell to television partners, applies to games sold to non-broadcast entities, like cable networks and streamers.
Since the Justice Department launched its investigation last month, the NFL has parroted a statistic that has become familiar to everyone following the story: 87% of all games last season were telecast on free, over-the-air broadcast networks, a number that increases to 100% in a team’s local market. In other words, despite consumer angst about fragmentation in sports broadcasting and the transition to streaming, which has seen the NFL divvy up exclusive games to Netflix, Peacock, ESPN+, Prime Video, and YouTube in recent years, the vast majority of games still end up on a broadcast network. And even when the NFL does schedule a streaming-exclusive game, it remains available on a broadcast network within the local markets of the teams playing.
But even with the stats already behind the NFL, the league will seemingly take measures to improve upon that 87% figure this upcoming season. How exactly the league gets there will be interesting.
Reports already suggest that YouTube is in line for a five-game package, and Netflix is looking to expand upon its two-game Christmas Day slate into other parts of the season. Sherman reports that the four additional games the NFL received from its NFL Network deal with ESPN, games that were previously Monday Night Football doubleheaders, will be split between YouTube and Netflix, so those won’t be adding to the broadcast footprint. Fox is reportedly in line to air a third Christmas Day game, an honor that went to Prime Video last season on account of the holiday landing on a Thursday, so that is perhaps at least one additional broadcast-network game. But if the NFL still wants to award both YouTube and Netflix with “mini-packages” of four-to-five games, as has previously been indicated, some of that inventory will necessarily come from current linear partners.
We’ll soon find out how this all settles. The league will announce its full schedule next Wednesday or Thursday, per CNBC.
