NFL's new TV rights deal is a bet on a pay-TV model that's been in decline

The New York Times

As The New York Times' Kevin Draper points out, the NFL's deal through the 2033 season is an eternity in the constantly evolving world of television. "The agreements, which will begin in 2023 and which mostly run through the 2033 season, fundamentally look quite similar to the last set of media agreements the N.F.L. signed in the early 2010s," says Draper. "Sunday afternoon games will remain on Fox and CBS, Sunday night games will remain on NBC, and Monday night games will remain on ESPN. The biggest difference is that 15 games on Thursday nights will be shown only on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service. While front and center in the news releases, streaming really exists around the edges of the N.F.L.’s future. ESPN, CBS and NBC all announced that N.F.L. games would appear on their streaming services, but in almost all cases, those will be simulcasts of what is being shown on their television channels. Just a single game each season will appear exclusively on ESPN’s and NBC’s streaming services outside the home markets of the teams that are playing. None will appear on CBS’s or Fox’s services. That means that if you pay for a television package, as more than 80 million American households still do — though that is down from over 100 million in 2011 — and if you pay for Amazon Prime, which more than 126 million Americans do, you can continue to watch the vast majority of N.F.L. games, including the Super Bowl and every playoff game, without paying for a streaming service." Draper adds: "The fact that many N.F.L. games are available on streaming services could backfire for the broadcast stations. Consumers could have an incentive to get rid of their expensive pay television packages, adopting cheaper streaming alternatives. If too many make the switch too fast — paying just $5 a month for NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock, instead of paying for NBC, USA, Bravo and other NBCUniversal channels through a pay TV package, for instance — the cheaper streaming services won’t generate enough revenue to help their parent companies pay billions of dollars to the N.F.L. each year. CBS, Fox and NBC will each pay the N.F.L. more than $2 billion a year, on average, about double what they paid under the old agreements, according to four people familiar with the agreements who requested anonymity because they were not authorized by the N.F.L. to speak publicly about the deals. ESPN will pay about $2.7 billion a year, on average, up from $2 billion."

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• With new deal, the NFL finally is taking care of ESPN: "For years, the Worldwide Leader had paid the most in rights fees in exchange for just a mediocre Monday Night Football game (and unlimited use of highlights on its studio shows), but that doesn’t make up for the troubles they’ve had with Monday Night Football," says Jimmy Traina. "In the new deal, though, ESPN gets some major perks, including flex scheduling for Monday Night Football beginning in Week 12 each season, a Saturday doubleheader in the season’s final week and, in their words, 'enhanced schedule quality.'"
• Amazon's huge deal, paying $1 billion a year for exclusive Thursday Night Football games, also illustrates how closely intertwined big-time sports is with traditional TV