Last week’s pay-to-watch playoff game was the most-watched live streaming event in U.S. history
THE MESSENGER
“I assume that there are some number of people, [the Super Bowl] is the only game they watched the entire year, and they don’t want to be left out. That’s a pretty great place to be for a live event. Fifty percent of the country does not want to be left out. It leads me to a slightly different discussion; if half the country is watching your game and they’re watching it for free, how many of those people would pay a big sum of money to watch the game?”
That was the question asked before last year’s Super Bowl by former ESPN president John Skipper during a February 2023 interview. Skipper knows a thing or two about successful programming. So would the NFL embrace putting easily-the-most-watched program of the year on a platform that isn’t free?
And by most-watched, we’re talking 115 million viewers tuning in. And the number is likely higher than that because many viewers attend house parties that could have several people watching one TV, making the overall number exponentially higher.
“I don’t know how many households, I assume it’s half the households who watched; if it was only a quarter of them are willing to pay $20 to have a party at their house, it would still get you into the billions of dollars for a single game,” Skipper added. “And that is the single best way I can think of for the NFL to increase their annual revenue take for their clubs, is to make the Super Bowl a pay-per-view event.”
We got a preview of what pay-to-watch playoff football would look when the league announced its marquee matchup of the week — featuring the league’s highest-scoring team, the Miami Dolphins, traveling to Kansas City to take on the defending champion Chiefs — would be on NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock. Subscription price: $5.99 per month.
The reaction from fans and sports media was decidedly negative, with many arguing that paying to watch the NFL was a slap in the face coming from a league that already rakes in more than $18 billion in annual revenue.
