Peter Kafka: ‘CBS and Fox’s primary reason to exist is to distribute football’

Cord-cutting has fundamentally changed how Americans consume television, making live sports — especially the NFL — more valuable than ever for broadcast networks.

That is the opinion of Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider, who discussed the future of broadcast television on Decoder, a podcast from The Verge.

“CBS and Fox, in particular, their primary reason to exist is to distribute football,” Kafka said. “Fox basically doesn’t have any other programming. They have some reality shows, and then they have football. That’s what they do now.”

“What you keep hearing from the Paramount folks,” Kafka added, “they really think that broadcast TV is a special thing. I think that mostly comes down to the fact that broadcast TV is a thing you can show football on.”

@decoderpod Channels host Peter Kafka on the real value of broadcast TV in the streaming era: “The primary reason CBS and Fox exist is to distribute football.” #nfl #streaming #tv #entertainment #sports ♬ original sound – Decoder with Nilay Patel

Football has not fully taken over Fox, as Kafka suggests. In addition to football, Fox also has important NASCAR and MLB rights deals, along with major sports draws such as the Indy 500 and this year’s FIFA World Cup. But it’s also true that football crushes the viewership of everything else. Last year, of the top 100 most-watched telecasts in the United States, 92 were football games, and 84 were NFL games.

As a result of that domination, football is important to keeping broadcast TV relevant. Broadcast networks primarily make money from advertising and retransmission fees, both of which are anchored in highly watched programming like the NFL.

Over-the-air networks without the NFL also do exist, but they have not found anything close to the success of the Big Four. Ion is the most prominent example and has been able to stay afloat partly by investing in women’s sports programming. The CW does not have an agreement with the NFL, though it has been building out its college football programming, including agreements to air ACC, Pac-12, and Mountain West games in 2026.

Outside of those two networks, however, the remaining Big Four over-the-air broadcasters all have agreements with both the NFL and college football. No other sport can say that, nor does it come close to matching the NFL’s importance to broadcast television, and every major network continues to build its sports strategy around that reality.