This was bound to happen eventually. College Football and Major League Baseball have already opened up the floodgates essentially. NBC is officially broadcasting exclusive MLB and CFB games on Peacock, while Apple TV is also in bed with MLB.
The Michigan Wolverines (No. 2 in the preseason AP Poll) took down East Carolina 30-3 Saturday, and they did so in front of a whole lot of viewers. The Peacock-exclusive game, called by Mike Tirico and Chris Simms, is the most streamed college football game in NBC Sports’ history.
So with results like that, it was only a matter of time before the NFL threw its hat in the ring, right?
When the Kansas City Chiefs play host to the Detroit Lions on Thursday, officially kicking off the 2023 NFL season, fans have the option to watch the game on NFL+. It’s an option, but not the only one. Well, that may not be the case moving forward, not for the opening kickoff of the season, but perhaps games scattered throughout the year.
NFL Media GM David Jurenka recently told Front Office Sports that the league has “some flexibility” to put games exclusively on NFL+.
“If it makes sense in terms of how we maximize reach and it’s complementary to the broader media model that we have, I think we’ll look at those things,” Jurenka told FOS.
Fans having to pay for the streaming services in order to watch their team play is already an unpopular phenomenon as is, just ask New York Yankees fans.
Yankees fans have known this for a few years now, and have been apt to complain about it any chance they get. Things reached a fever pitch during Aaron Judge’s quest to break the American League home run record last season when certain Yankees games were exclusively broadcast on Apple TV. The outcry eventually included stern rebukes from politicians despite the fact that it was free for anyone to watch the games.
But in this case, fans would have to pay for the service to watch a specific game. That might not go over so well.
“We have been envisioning NFL+ for many years now and (have been) very intentional with what we launched with last year and then what we’re adding with NFL Network and RedZone this year,” Jurenka said.
The NFL continues to beef up its subscription service, which was launched in 2022. Last week, it announced a new, five-episode docuseries entitled A Football Life Origins that will tell the stories of how NFL stars such as Micah Parsons and Davante Adams grew up and developed into the athletes we know today. Whether that draws in more subscribers, though, remains to be seen.
A docuseries is a bit different from exclusive broadcasting of a game, but it’s clear that the NFL has no plans of stopping the growth of its streaming platform anytime soon.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.