The NFL has fully embraced streaming with games airing this season on ESPN+, Peacock, YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix.
One of the most polarizing and successful moves that the league has made with a streamer is to complete a hostile takeover of Christmas Day from what once was the NBA’s regular season showcase. The move has been an eyebrow raiser not just because of the competition against the NBA, though. It’s also deepened the NFL’s relationship with streamers, adding in more games behind more paywalls than ever before. And it has blown any and all scheduling practices out of the water in making teams play on any day of the week. The NFL will now play any time, any day, anywhere they darn well please.
This year, the NFL partnered with Netflix and Amazon this year for a streaming tripleheader. And it produced huge dividends for those platforms while also signaling a historic moment for the media world.
According to Nielsen’s monthly Gauge, the Christmas holiday was the most streamed day on record. Streaming also captured 47.5% of television viewing in the month of December, a new monthly record that eclipsed what was seen in July of last year. December was also boosted by Netflix’s release of the final episodes of the sci-fi sensation Stranger Things and Amazon Prime’s coverage of the NBA Cup. Boosted by the NBA and NFL, Amazon Prime Video had its best month ever in the survey.
The huge day of streaming viewership was driven by back-to-back NFL games on Netflix, strategically followed by the highly anticipated release of new Stranger Things episodes, in addition to Prime Video’s late NFL game. Combined, Netflix and Prime Video commanded 22.5% of total TV usage across the day. Meanwhile, streaming levels overall on Christmas Day swelled to an unprecedented 54% of daily TV usage, the largest single-day share of TV ever recorded by the category. Streaming’s dominance in December was further evidenced by the fact that the category exceeded 50% of daily TV usage twice, having occurred for the first time ever on Saturday, December 13 when streaming represented 50.4% of TV.
Fans are slowly getting used to the idea of more streaming games, especially the Christmas Day action. Viewership numbers increased from last year with Vikings-Lions reaching 27.5 million viewers on Netflix and all three games posting strong numbers. It certainly shows that the NFL can succeed wherever they go, which is why the league will likely opt out of its television deals as soon as it can to cash in even more.
By comparison, traditional linear television only accounted for just a 41.6% viewing share combined in December, further underscoring the tectonic shifts in media.
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