17.1 million viewers is what the NFL averages per game.
272 is the yearly number of NFL games.
112.3 million was the number of viewers for 2022’s Super Bowl.

And just for comparison to the NFL and other things on cable.

4.4 million is the average for the NBA.
1.7 million is the MLB’s EPSN average, versus 14 million for the NFL.
857,000 views is ESPN’s average for the NHL.

The NFL is by far the strongest thing on cable, surpassing all other sports and despite games being much longer, they average nearly 2x the 9.4 million viewers Blue Bloods gets as the highest rated scripted TV show.

The NFL just announced they’ll be getting into paid streaming, where the plan is to launch NFL+, for $4.99 a month.

The NFL right now makes 11 billion dollars per years off all the cable contracts combined, which doesn’t include deals still being done with streaming.

Before ticket sales, merchandise and other forms of revenue, for the next decade, the NFL will make 11 billion yearly.

That said though, could there be more money in streaming everything independent and skipping the middle man?

29.7 billion was Netflix’s 2021 revenue.
5.4 billion was Disney+’s revenue as a new product, people still are getting trial discounts on.
8.7 billion is the reported earnings on HBO Max and HBO, again will go up heavily in the next 1-2 years as trials end.

Figuring out if Netflix has a chance of doing this, first thing is figuring out what NFL+ actually is.

It’s a streaming service for $4.99 a month or $40 a year, which gives people access to watch NFL games on their phones or tablets.

Nothing else.

They said they’ll strictly enforce it so tools can’t be used to stream games on someone’s TV’s as much as possible, likely to preserve cable/existing streaming platforms viewers.

Another point is it is only for new/recent games, versus the NHL that has a similar product for $99 a year, but has decades of old games, interviews and commentary.

This suggests the NFL is pretty happy preserving the current model, which is them licensing content to a series of competing groups.

That being said at $5 rounded per month, could they actually make more over the cable deals?

It’s reported 1 in 4 American’s watch 5 hours of sports per week.

That sounds like a lot, but isn’t actually that much.

75 million American’s have Netflix.
3.2 hours a day is what it’s reported the average users consumes daily.

The high end of sports is 5 hours a week, largely broken up into different months of the year.

Netflix, which has a much bigger total audience is getting over 3x that many users.

On top of that, Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max are all growing larger outside the US, where while the NFL is king of America, it’s much smaller overseas.

There’s also a value issue in perception, where a streaming service such as Disney+ is charging $8 a month for nearly all properties ever made by Disney, Fox Studio’s, Marvel, Pixar and LucasFilm.

That’s simply a better value over a monthly streaming service, which the majority of the year wouldn’t produce much if any new content.

That makes it pretty obvious NFL+ would never get close to enough users to justify leaving existing contracts.

And there’s an important lesson to this.

Not every company needs to be a streaming service.

Right now, there’s a massive war for the number one spot with Disney, Warner, Paramount, Netflix, Amazon, NBC, Apple and others to be the number one streamer in the world.

These companies are investing over 50 billion a year into producing and licensing content, where it’ll hit over 100 billion before the end of the decade.

For a lot of brands, the better approach might just be focusing on building up the value of the IP and letting companies fight for the streaming rights.

Studio Ghibli is doing that now, where Netflix has the European rights to their movies and HBO has the US rights, both reporting they are the most watched animated content on each platform.

Paramount also had that strategy before investing hard into Paramount+, where Warner is paying them 100 million a year to stream just South Park and Paramount is now producing movies, exclusive to Paramount+.

This seems like an example, where every generic MBA thinks streaming is the place to go, but just building a great brand and letting Apple, Amazon and Disney fight for it with a check book is the better option.

Something I think the NFL understands and NFL+ will likely be a niche product to cash in on super fans and nothing else.