Netflix will movement Christmas Day National Football League games for the next three years, in its first goal correct step into dwell sports actions.
The streaming platform will inform two games on Christmas Day this yr, followed by at the least one matchup in both 2025 and 2026, the league launched Wednesday. The games will continue to be accessible on broadcast TV in local team markets and on the NFL+ mobile app.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, however folks familiar with the topic talked about Netflix will pay in the ballpark of $75 million per game. Spokespeople for the NFL and Netflix declined to comment.
The streamer will rent its hold announcers for the games and partner with present production companies. Sarandos urged CNBC he felt the NFL used to be the valid match because it matched the streamer’s tournament strategy, allowing Netflix to successfully hold the day.
Netflix has drawn expansive audiences with sports actions programming, from the “Formulation 1: Power to Live on” documentary to its “Quarterback” sequence following NFL designate callers. Whereas the company took foremost strides into dwell programming with a deal to movement the WWE’s “Raw” and a boxing war between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, the company instant it had no longer stumbled on a dwell sports actions rights strategy that labored for it.
“We have got no longer considered a profit course to renting big sports actions,” Sarandos talked about in December 2022.
“We’re no longer anti-sports actions, we’re factual expert-profit,” Sarandos talked about.
Now, Netflix will movement games for the most-watched U.S. sports actions league, at a time when it is a ways making an are attempting and elevate earnings by raising subscription costs, pushing customers toward an ad-tier membership and cracking down on password sharing.
The games would possibly well possibly give Netflix a foremost draw for advertisers. The three Christmas Day NFL games averaged 28.68 million viewers last yr, in step with Sports actions Media Watch.
The Christmas Day matchups can characteristic as a marketing ramp up for Netflix forward of it begins airing “Raw” in January.
The streaming big’s forays into dwell occasions like no longer come without factors. Its dwell reunion tournament for the hit truth TV inform “Like Is Blind” in April 2023 had a technical worm that delayed the movement for greater than an hour, at which point the inform used to be no longer dwell.
The announcement comes as streamers across the alternate inform rising ardour in dwell sports actions programming, specifically the NFL.
In January, NBCUniversal’s Peacock confirmed an NFL Wild Card game between the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, marking the first time a playoff game used to be broadcast completely on a streaming service. Amazon‘s Prime Video has already snatched the irregular rights to an NFL playoff game next season.
Amazon furthermore signed a media rights deal with the NFL in 2021, where it agreed to pay about $1 billion per yr to like irregular Thursday Evening Football rights for 10 years, starting with the 2023 season. The deal used to be the first time a streaming service carried a paunchy package of games completely.
Netflix also can very successfully be looking out out for to division out into basketball, as successfully. CNBC reported last yr that Netflix, alongside with Amazon, Apple, YouTube TV and Comcast’s NBCUniversal/Peacock, like all had preliminary conversations with the National Basketball Association about doubtless ardour in media rights when the league’s contend with Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery comes to an terminate after next season.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.
— CNBC’s Alex Sherman and Lillian Rizzo contributed to this file
Don’t leave out these exclusives from CNBC PRO
