BUSINESS INSIDER
If you want to watch the Miami Dolphins play the Kansas City Chiefs in the NFL playoffs on Saturday — or if you just want to see if Taylor Swift will be watching the game from a private booth — you’ll need two things:
And that’s going to be a surprise to many Americans, who have come to expect to be able to watch the most popular sport in America — and the most popular programming on TV — by simply clicking over to whatever channel is broadcasting it. And without having to pay an additional fee.
Not this time.
That’s because last year, NBCUniversal paid the NFL $110 million for the rights to a streaming-only playoff game. Now the media giant is trying to get its money’s worth — and to help boost Peacock, which until now has been an also-ran in the streaming wars.
So expect to hear quite a bit of grumbling this weekend from fans who expected to see the game on their TV Saturday night and who realize they’ll need a paid streaming service to make that happen. And maybe even more grumbling from fans who do pay up but run into the vagaries that still bedevil livestreaming — inconsistent broadband speeds, bad WiFi setups, TVs that aren’t connected to the internet, etc.
All of which is why the NFL, until now, hasn’t put their biggest games on streaming-only platforms.
For years, the NFL — by far the most powerful sports league in the country — has been very successful at using streaming as a way to make extra money. Either by selling streaming rights to games that are also distributed on conventional TV or by doing a handful of streaming-only games — like the ones Amazon is paying $1 billion a year for on Thursday nights — but making sure those aren’t the marquee match-ups.
But the league has always been clear that it wants the biggest possible reach for its product, and that meant working with traditional TV. And when it comes to the playoffs, which last year averaged around 30 million viewers per game — numbers no other TV programming can touch these days — that has always meant broadcast TV available around the country. (One exception: In 2015, cable channel ESPN aired a single playoff game.)
So Saturday’s game is a meaningful change and also a good test: NFL games are essentially the only thing people watch on conventional TV in any numbers at this point, and conventional TV is shrinking daily. So: What happens to TV when those games aren’t there?
Some caveats: Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent company, says 30 million people are paying for a Peacock subscription already (I’m one of them — I started paying last year so I could watch English soccer games). And people who live in the Kansas City and Miami areas will be able to watch the games on traditional TV.
The NFL and NBC know they’re going to get grief for this, by the way. And they take pains to point out that most NFL games are available on free broadcast TV, and it will stay that way. They also argue that putting a game on Peacock helps increase their reach since young viewers don’t watch traditional TV now anyway.
That’s at least a little bit of a stretch, though: Making something available on streaming is very different than forcing people to use streaming to watch it.
But we’ll see. At a press call with reporters earlier this week, NFL distribution executive Hans Schroeder wouldn’t commit to whether the league would do more streaming-only playoff games next year: “This is a deal for this year, but it’s an NFL playoff game. I expect there will be a lot of interest in it.”
