With Fox backing out of early NFL negotiations, will other networks follow?

Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch, as he’s wont to do, made some headlines during his company’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday morning.

The CEO plainly announced that Fox would not look to engage in media rights negotiations with the NFL prior to the league’s contractual opt-out option following the 2029-30 season. Throughout the past year, the NFL has sought to compel networks to pay the league more money now and, in exchange, remove its opt-out options at the end of the decade, thus allowing its deals to run through the 2033-34 season when they’re scheduled to terminate. Reports suggest that the NFL is seeking to as much as double its current rights fees, which amount to approximately $10 billion per year across CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Prime Video, and YouTube TV (Sunday Ticket).

The league could very well get there. After all, $10 billion per year is not that much more than what the NBA just got in its new 11-year, $76 billion deals, and the NBA has a much smaller audience than the NFL. The question after Murdoch’s remarks on Thursday morning is whether the league will see that financial windfall soon, or if it will have to wait until its exit options hit after the 2029-30 season (or the 2030-31 season for ESPN).

Here, we’ll run through each of the NFL’s other four primary broadcast partners and discuss whether they are likely to strike a deal with the league early, or like Fox, wait for the contractual opt-out to hit before renegotiating with the league.

CBS

The most likely of the four remaining NFL broadcast partners to complete an early deal with the league is CBS. The network was the only one reportedly in formal discussions with the league regarding an update to its media rights deal, and that’s because it’s the only network at risk of losing NFL rights before the league’s opt-out clause comes up. However, those talks are reportedly on hold as Paramount figures out its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Last summer, Skydance completed its purchase of CBS parent company Paramount, triggering a change-of-control provision in the network’s NFL deal that gives the league a two-year window to shop those rights around on the open market if it chooses to do so. If the NFL is still committed to solidifying as many of these early deals as it can, CBS is the one that would be closest to a shoe-in.

But that is a big if. At the earliest, the NFL would have updated deals in place for the 2027-28 season. Is the league still willing to eliminate its opt-out clause in exchange for just three extra seasons of higher revenue? Or would it rather simply wait until the opt-outs hit and have the ability to completely reshape how it packages and sells its media rights moving forward?

Given the limited upside, particularly if other networks decide, like Fox, to wait until the end of the decade to reengage the NFL, there’s a possibility the league simply waves a white flag on early renewals altogether. But if there is one network that’s the most likely to strike a new deal beforehand, it’s CBS.

NBC

NBC is in an interesting spot with the NFL. More than ever, NBC needs the NFL. The network is set to be spun out by parent company Comcast next year, and without the corporate backing of Comcast’s connectivity business, NFL rights become an existential matter for NBC, just like they are for Fox and CBS.

On paper, that would signal a willingness from NBC to get a deal done with the league. As a new standalone business, it’d like to have some sort of stability with its most important partner, the NFL.

However, out of each current NFL broadcast partner, NBC is probably the partner the NFL would most like to exercise its opt-out clause on following the 2029-30 season. The reasoning is simple: NBC has Sunday Night Football, and Sunday Night Football is the package that would attract the most bidders on the open market.

So far, tech companies and streamers have been relatively conservative in their approach to live sports rights. Few have offered the kind of eye-popping deals some expected they would just a handful of years ago. But the types of rights the streamers have shown interest in are the big events. Prime Video, for instance, broadcasts the top Champions League game of the week in several European countries. It has a weekly package of top NHL games in Canada. Netflix’s four-game mini-package of NFL contests comprises only of premium standalone matchups. Sunday Night Football fits this mold perfectly.

So while NBC might actually show a willingness to engage the NFL early and try to secure the future of Sunday Night Football into the 2030s, it could be the NFL that wants to pump the breaks on signing an early deal because of the robust market that package would command.

ESPN

The only partner whose opt-out clause is set to follow the 2030-31 season, ensuring the network gets to air its second-ever Super Bowl that year, ESPN is in a unique position compared to its peers. Not only is the opt-out a year later, but it’s the only network that is partly owned by the league itself (so long as you exclude the NFL’s de minimis holding in Paramount via an old Skydance investment).

That relationship would seem to indicate ESPN is at minimal risk of losing NFL rights entirely, which would mean there’s little motivation to begin paying the NFL more money several seasons early. But there’s certainly also a dynamic where, if the NFL wants ESPN to complete an early deal, and the NFL owns a 10 percent stake in ESPN, the two sides will find a way to get some sort of deal on the books.

It’s fair to say the likelihood of this deal happening early will come down entirely to the NFL’s desires.

Prime Video

Amazon’s Prime Video, the exclusive broadcaster of Thursday Night Football, is, in our estimation, the least likely to strike an early renewal with the NFL. The streamer simply has very little incentive to do so. Unlike the other four NFL broadcast partners, all of which are reliant on the ever-declining pay-TV bundle (and thereby the NFL) to float their businesses, Prime Video is not beholden to those same economics. In fact, Prime Video is the only NFL partner which can confidently say that, long-term, the NFL is more reliant on them than they are reliant on the NFL. That’s because down the line, when legacy broadcasters are too feeble to afford NFL rights, the league will need tech giants like Amazon to step up to the plate and pay top dollar to broadcast the league.

And Amazon, just like every other major tech company, has much larger concerns than its NFL rights package in the form of rising costs associated with investments in AI.

There’s simply little incentive for Prime Video to start paying more for the NFL than it has to. The league can’t credibly threaten to withhold inventory from the company down the line because it knows it needs Amazon at the table in future negotiations. Not to mention, Prime Video already pays a bargain-basement price for Thursday Night Football (just $1 billion per year). Why would it willingly start to pay more knowing that the NFL will need them regardless whenever the league begins its next round of media rights negotiations?

Prime Video seems the most likely to follow in Fox’s footsteps and simply wait for the NFL to opt out of its contract at the end of the decade.