Nielsen reported on Thursday that the NFL’s two Christmas games on Netflix drew just short of 65 million unduplicated viewers, which is about half a Super Bowl. To say this is a massive win for the NFL is an understatement, especially after Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James sent shots at football on the same day.
Between one-off Peacock exclusives, Amazon Prime owning Thursday Night Football and Black Friday games (which are designed to keep you out of brick-and-mortar stores) and now Netflix, it appears that the league has figured out how to get its audience onto streaming platforms. According to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, the two Christmas Day games this year had the NFL’s biggest individual viewership numbers for streaming-only games in the league’s history.
So what now? Expect to hear a lot about the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. The league clearly craves more island games, based on the early London/Germany, Black Friday, Christmas, double Monday Night Football and Week 1 (think Green Bay Packers vs. Philadelphia Eagles in Brazil on a Friday) packages. Unfortunately for the NFL, most Americans are working from Monday through Friday and the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 protects high school football and college football from competing with the NFL on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively. This leaves little room for the league to expand their island game slate.
Here’s the million-dollar question that the NFL will hope to manipulate moving forward: Is a stream a broadcast?
At its core, this act bans NFL telecasts in areas where active high school or college football games are being played on Fridays and Saturdays. So if a broadcasting station is within 75 miles of a high school game, the federal government currently bans an NFL broadcast over the airwaves on Fridays. The same would be said of a college game on Saturdays. That, obviously, covers a lot of the nation, which is why the NFL chooses not to play these games until the second Saturday of December, which is when the league’s restrictions end.
But is a stream a broadcast? What counts as a stream’s broadcasting station? Does it have one? If Netflix moves the “broadcasting station” to another country, just to upload it to the internet, accessible in the United States, does that get around this law? There are a lot of questions to answer. And the league just needs to win on one front.
So far, the NFL has been totally compliant with the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. When the Packers played the Eagles in Brazil on September 6th, for example, they played on an unprotected Friday. The act only bans pro football broadcasts from the second Friday of September through the second Saturday of December.
When the NFL moves onto Saturday games after Army-Navy, it’s after the second Saturday of December. Nothing is even in a legal gray area…yet.
At some point, though, the NFL is gonna look at the numbers they draw on island games, rather than an average game from their usual overlapping CBS and FOX slate on Sundays, and test their expansion of island games on a larger scale.
You’ve heard “What is a catch?” Get ready for “What is a broadcast?” It’s coming.
