The NFL has the most watched product, can set their terms, and the consumer will pay.
The NFL has the most watched product, can set their terms, and the consumer will pay.
We made them billionaires.
They need to relearn that lesson..........................
Someone needs to tell whoever produced that chart graphic that NFL footballs do not have stripes and they are slightly smaller around..................
And the millions of Swifties paying to see Taylor.
NBC's Sunday Night Football was the highest rated show in the 2022-2023 TV broadcast season. A regular-season game with a highly attractive matchup might attract 25 million viewers. That sounds like a lot of people, but in a nation of 341 million people it is not nearly as impressive as it would have been several decades ago. It's also far more than the 9-12 million that the NFL might attract to an ordinary Sunday night game.
Sports programming is migrating to subscription-based outlets because the writing is on the wall for the TV industry. There are so many entertainment options available out there that it's impossible to generate a sizable audience with the "dispersion effect" in television. We are getting to the point where networks can't generate sufficient viewers for much of their programming to attract enough advertising revenue to cover the cost of producing the shows.
So the NFL is now looking at capturing direct revenue from whatever fraction of the 25 million viewers (50%? 25%?) is willing to shell out cash for the privilege of watching these staged events ... rather than trying to generate revenue from a TV network that then has to sell advertising time to corporations that are getting increasingly skeptical of the return on their investment in that ad time.
In the mid-1960s, it wasn't uncommon for Bonanza to attract 15-20 million viewers on a weekly basis -- and that was in a nation of about 180 million people. That was the heyday of network television, and it's not coming back.