As the NFL faces bombardment from seemingly every corner of Washington over its migration of more games to streaming, the league made its first reported response last Friday.
According to a report by Joe Flint in The Wall Street Journal, the NFL met with senior officials at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Friday to justify its current broadcast distribution strategy. The NFL reportedly requested the meeting, which came after the FCC launched a probe into how sports leagues are increasingly selling game inventory to streaming services, which, in the agency’s estimation, threatens the future of broadcast networks.
The NFL’s top media executive, Hans Schroeder, reportedly attended the meeting, greeting league officials “before turning the meeting over to his top advisers.” The league’s presentation reiterated its stance that it’s the most-accessible sports league in the country, citing that 87% of games are available on over-the-air broadcast networks, with 100% of games available on broadcast within a team’s local market.
Schroeder’s team also reportedly outlined that fragmentation of sports broadcasts would likely worsen if the federal government rescinded the antitrust exemption granted to professional sports leagues under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
The argument, from the NFL’s perspective, is that if the FCC’s goal is to protect local broadcasters, keeping the antitrust exemption in place is practically a prerequisite.
While the FCC was the first federal agency to display some formal level of interest in the fragmentation of sports broadcasts, perhaps the more pressing action comes from the Justice Department, which recently launched an investigation into how the antitrust exemption granted to professional sports leagues should be enforced.
“The key antitrust question is whether the process by which those prices are set remains competitive,” the Justice Department antitrust division’s acting deputy assistant attorney general Charlie Beller said at a conference on Monday. If the Justice Department believes the exemption is sufficiently interfering with competition in the market for media rights, thereby driving prices up for consumers, it could take action to amend the terms of the exemption.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.