Posted on 12/27/2024 7:55:01 AM PST by Red Badger
The numbers are in for the NFL's debut on Netflix on Christmas Day and two things are certain: We're talking records and this won't be the last time the league and streaming service team up beyond its current three-year agreement.
The headline is the Kansas City Chiefs versus the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Houston Texans versus the Baltimore Ravens on Netflix delivered the two most-streamed NFL games in history, with an average audience of over 24 million viewers each.
Bad News For LeBron And NBA So, LeBron James, who on Wednesday infamously proclaimed that Christmas sports viewing belongs to the NBA, is going to be crying when he sees the numbers.
Christmas was a record-breaking day for Netflix and the NFL, with a total unduplicated audience of nearly 65 million U.S. viewers, according to Nielsen.
The Ravens versus Texans (24.3 million average minute audience) and Chiefs versus Steelers (24.1 million average minute audience) are the most-streamed NFL games in U.S. history, according to Nielsen.
The NBA's games averaged 5.5 million viewers each.
Womp, womp, womp.
Ravens and Texans Attracted 27 Million Viewers U.S. viewership for Ravens-Texans peaked with over 27 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
Global ratings and additional U.S. insights will be released Dec. 31 – providing a comprehensive look at Netflix’s NFL Christmas Gameday performance worldwide.
Ravens-Texans, the second game of the day's doubleheader, was the most-watched Christmas Day game on record among the 18-to-34-year-old demographic, with 5.1 million U.S. viewers based on Nielsen records dating back to 2001.
"We’re thrilled with our first Christmas Gameday on Netflix with NFL games being streamed to a global audience," said Hans Schroeder, NFL executive vice president of media distribution in a statement. "Fans in all 50 states and over 200 countries around the world watched some of the league’s brightest stars along with a dazzling performance by Beyoncé in a historic day for the NFL."
Future For NFL-Netflix Is Bright This year marked the first of a three-season partnership with Netflix to broadcast NFL games on Christmas Day.
It is now possible several things will happen:
Netflix, which is said to covet more sports coverage to stream live, may attempt to add to its portfolio of games when the NFL next opens bidding on its broadcast packages, per an industry source.
The NFL, which wants to expand its brand worldwide with international games, could now see the global reach of Netflix as another avenue for doing that. And that could eventually mean more games on Netflix.
LeBron James couldn't have gotten it more wrong.
Wonder what the demos are.
The demographics are not available for the overnights. With the international market of Netflix, I suspect the numbers will be higher. The ESPN article I saw said the numbers were lower than last year’s broadcast ###s, but not by much. Overtime those will rise higher than what broadcast TV could give them. And they are international.
Netflix had around 282.7 million paid subscribers worldwide as of the third quarter of 2024. This marked an increase of over five million subscribers compared with the previous quarter. Most Netflix subscribers are based in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), accounting for around 96 million of Netflix’s total global subscriber base.
the networks may be declining
but still plenty on broadcast outside of the networks
5.5 million is actually really good for the NBA. Much higher than normal games. Nobody can compete with the NFL, it’s the king. The probowl bets better ratings than the other sports’ championships. Read that again, the PROBOWL, an exhibition game that doesn’t count and everybody hates beats everybody else’s championship. So the NBA wasn’t going to win the head to head. They used to own Christmas, and then NFL dipped their toes in the water when Christmas fell on NFLs days and it worked great, and now they want it, and that’s that. The NFL gets what it wants. But if the NBA can still get good numbers, higher than normal numbers, then they got nothing to cry about.
Sunday Ticket has been around for decades. It’s kind of meaningless, and not that popular.
No they’ll never go all pay per view. That’ll never make the money they’re making with the bidding wars. Having more networks wanting football than the league is willing to sell football is what drove the price through the roof. When Fox snaked the NFC contract from CBS the arrow when from up and to the right to just up. Now the smallest contract, Amazon’s Thursday night contract, is $1 billion a year. With the MNF contract being $2.7 bil. PPV will never through that much money in.
65 million viewers. Everybody is laughing all the way to the bank. Advertisers are plenty happy.
NFL network showed them after they ere over.
Yes. They show ads.
Both Amazon and Hulu let you sub-subscribe to other streaming services. And pretty much everybody but Netflix is in their list. So you can get the hub effect.
ESPN is trying to spin up an “all the sports” streaming service, it was supposed to start last month, but somebody sued them for monopoly violation, so that’ll take a couple of years to wind its way through court. I was bummed, cause I was going to cut the cable when I subscribed to that, figured I’d add 3 or 4 other streams to get the handful of stuff I like on cable and save about $100. But nooooooo, somebody had to sue. I think my cable company actually.
Disney owns ESPN. They won’t be happy. They are already going broke from going woke.
I’ll check that, thanks.
Although I’m wondering if the ‘hub’ should be a separate entity from being a streaming service (?). I just want to pay for what I want, not everything else! You’d think it’d be easy...but the system resists, probably because so many leftist media orgs make money through them.
From an anti-monopoly standpoint the hub absolutely should be somebody bit in the streaming business. From a practical standpoint a streaming service has all the infrastructure and UI necessary to run a streaming service, and therefore multiple services as 1. This is especially true for Amazon since most of the streamers now use AWS for their backend storage and bandwidth.
One thing I really like about using Amazon for my hub is the various “deal windows” (Prime Days in summer, Christmas shopping season). Often times there will be great introductory deals for the services, 2 months for 3 bucks or something. I like to use those for “surgical strikes”, grab a service for the deal window, watch all the stuff I’m interested in, and cancel before the price goes up.
You pay $100 for cable TV. Or $139 for prime. $15 for Netflix. $8 for Peacock (some football games)
Streaming isn't really a good deal anymore. Netflix and Amazon are both Leftist. So there's no difference.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.