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NFL on Netflix: What’s at stake for the league, the streamer, the fans and the NBA

As the streamer prepares for its Christmas Day close-up, there's plenty on the line for everyone involved.

jay busbee
Senior writer
·7-min read

Don’t lose that remote among all your crumpled wrapping paper and empty boxes on Christmas Day, because if you want to watch two key NFL games, you’re going to have to call up a new channel. Netflix is plunging headlong into the live-streaming sports business, broadcasting two NFL games on Christmas Day.

The NFL gifted Netflix two playoff-implication games: Kansas City at Pittsburgh at 1 p.m. ET, and Baltimore at Houston at 4:30 p.m. ET. An entire sleighful of analysts and commentators will take part in the two-game extravaganza. And because too much is never enough at Christmastime, the second game will feature a halftime performance from Beyoncé. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

The Christmas Day NFL duo marks Netflix’s largest live-streaming effort to date — and the streaming service’s biggest gamble since opting for streaming over DVD-by-mail. Here’s what’s at stake for everyone involved.

(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports)
(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports)

The NFL has scheduled Christmas Day games for the past five years. Since Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year, that presented a logistical challenge. Because of the tight turnaround time from the preceding or following Sunday, there’s a pretty short history of NFL games on Wednesdays. There was that one Steelers-Ravens game during COVID — let us never speak of those days again — and a 2012 Cowboys-Giants season kickoff that moved to avoid a speech by President Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention. Before that, you have to go all the way back to 1948 for a Wednesday game.

Not wanting to force any of its teams into an even shorter late-season turnaround, the NFL initially planned to take 2024 off from Christmas broadcasts. Then the league got a look at the ratings for last year’s Christmas games — three games averaging 28.68 million viewers, topping at 29.48 for Raiders-Chiefs — and decided that, yes, football on a Wednesday is viable after all.

Bending even the calendar to its indomitable will and hunger, the NFL simply scheduled the four Christmas Day teams for Saturday games in Week 16, giving them the same amount of time off as they’d have for a Sunday-to-Thursday turnaround. Combine that with $150 million from Netflix to broadcast the two games, and here we are.

Still, that compacted timeframe means the teams will be playing three games in an 11-day span, which Patrick Mahomes conceded was “not a good feeling.” But the game rolls on, hopefully with everyone intact at the end of Christmas Day.

For the NFL, the Netflix move is a play with nothing but upside. Netflix has 282.3 million subscribers in 190 countries. Every one of whom could theoretically watch this game as part of their normal subscription. That’s an enticing proposition for a league that always has its eyes on the next potential conquest.

Worst-case scenario, the league continues on with its existing partners. Best-case: there’s a new streaming source of revenue in town for the league. And Beyoncé’s halftime extravaganza around 6 p.m. ET could bring plenty of non-football fans to the screen for the show and turn Christmas Day into a second Super Bowl Sunday. Win-win for the NFL, as always.

The streaming service that’s gone all-in on original content and A-list movie stars is walking a much higher tightrope with its NFL endeavor. First and foremost, there’s the question of whether everyone will even be able to watch the games, given the technical glitches that marred the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson “fight” that Netflix broadcast last month. As the AP notes, that fight topped out at 65 million concurrent streams, while the largest audience for a streamed NFL game to date is last season's Dolphins-Chiefs wild-card playoff game on Peacock, which recorded 23 million viewers.

Netflix has insisted that it will be ready for the onslaught of NFL fans — and, later in the broadcast, Beyoncé fans — but there are surely some nerves around Netflix HQ right about now.

On a broader scale, the NFL games represent a huge leap forward for Netflix in its global entertainment ambitions. Netflix is going all-in on the production, bringing more than 20 names from the worlds of sports and entertainment to provide pre-, in- and postgame commentary.

(Via Netflix)
(Via Netflix)

The allure of the NFL for Netflix is obvious. Live sports are the last remaining real-time programming; no one records a game to watch it days or weeks later, the way most of us do with TV series. As the NFL distances itself from the more activist days of 2020 and 2021, it’s become one of the few unifying forms of entertainment still available in a polarized America. Netflix is riding that trend and intending to capitalize on it.

Netflix has broadcast some one-off live events before, including golf and tennis matches and Paul/Tyson. Christmas Day marks the streamer’s first intended repeat business; Netflix could get Christmas Day games in the coming years, and will begin broadcasting WWE’s Monday Night Raw in January. Further down the line, Netflix will be broadcasting the Women’s World Cup, a surprising broadcast coup and a sign that Amazon and Apple aren’t the only streaming-only services in town.

We’re several years into the Great Sports Streaming Shift, so by now it shouldn’t be that big of a mental adjustment to conceive of watching NFL games on streaming-only platforms. Yes, you have to track down that elusive remote and navigate your way to a new service, but it’s not all that different from locating the Prime Video games on Thursday night or Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. The NFL has been training fans to search out its games on streaming services for a several years now, exactly for moments like this.

It’s worth remembering, though, that not everyone has a smart TV with Netflix already enabled. More to the point, not everyone has Netflix. That’s obviously the streamer’s goal, getting more subscribers out of this whole endeavor, but for the fans, it can mean scrambling, locating a credit card, and frantic calls to the children or grandchildren to get Netflix working on a Christmas Day. The ratings for this endeavor will be an interesting barometer of how far fans are willing to go to chase, and pay for, something that was once free and easy.

Oh, wait — there are actual games to talk about! Almost forgot. In the early game, Kansas City can clinch the No. 1 seed in the AFC, an opening-round bye and home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs with a victory. That’s incentive enough to push through the three-games-in-11-days fatigue. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, needs to keep ahead of Baltimore over both of its final two games to keep its AFC North championship hopes alive; both are 10-5 right now.

In the later game, Houston has already clinched a playoff spot but can move up a notch if the two AFC North teams struggle over the last two games. Baltimore’s path to an AFC North title starts with winning on Christmas. If both AFC North teams go 2-0 (or 0-2) over their last two games, Pittsburgh wins the tiebreaker, but if they go 1-1, things get much more complicated. Baltimore has to go undefeated and hope Pittsburgh loses one for the best possible chance.

If you were to think of the NBA as Whoville, happily broadcasting its Christmas Day games for years on end, and the NFL as the Grinch, striding in to steal Christmas right out from under the Whos, well … that’s pretty much on target. The NFL’s Christmas Day assault couldn’t have come at a worse time for the NBA, which stands at the end of the LeBron-Steph-KD era and at the beginning of a new, uncertain one. Concerns about the league’s ratings may or may not be overblown, but there’s no disputing that the NFL dwarfs the NBA in popularity, and will vacuum up many casual viewers on what was once the NBA’s own holiday.

The guy just came off a worldwide jaunt; he deserves to watch some football with his boots off, his feet up and a glass of eggnog at hand. Who will Santa be cheering for? Why, your favorite team, of course.