NFL owner doesn’t feel league is trending toward subscription streaming services

The NFL’s first international game of the 2024 season — a Week 1 matchup featuring the Philadelphia Eagles and a yet-to-be-announced opponent in Brazil — will be broadcast exclusively on Peacock as the league attempts to capitalize on the growing number of cord-cutting sports fans.

While the number of NFL games featured on streaming-only platforms such as Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” or last season’s first-ever Black Friday game, or Peacock’s Super Wild Card Weekend playoff matchup is growing, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie doesn’t believe the NFL is moving toward an exodus from free broadcasts on cable television to a streaming-heavy model.

“The NFL is like other sports leagues, but we're proactive when itself comes to demographics,” Lurie said, via CBS Sports. “We want to be younger at times, streamers and Amazons have the ability to deliver younger audiences. The beauty of NFL is most of it is on free television and it's going to remain that way a long, long time, that's the basis of the popularity of the NFL.” 

After the success of the Super Wildcard Weekend playoff matchup between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs on Peacock, which drew 28 million viewers, Peacock could become a major contender to regularly host NFL games.

The 2024 international game will serve as a solid benchmark for the platform as to whether the playoff game was simply a one-off or if it has sustainable growth. Either way, Lurie doesn’t see platforms like Peacock negotiating streaming rights for NFL games becoming the norm anytime soon.

“I don't see it more and more, but what I do see is population embraces streaming in certain ways, tremendously,” Lurie said. “So technically, it was the wild-card game on Peacock that was a huge success. I think they had 21, 22 million viewers, technologically it was excellent. And so it's also a younger demographic. It's just another way to go to expand distribution of games. But the bulwark of NFL games are free and direct access for all consumers.”

Though Peacock had instant success with its first go-around in sports streaming, Amazon is still learning how to navigate the market. Its “Thursday Night Football” viewership, which averaged 11.86M viewers, was up 24% from the 9.58M it averaged in 2022, the platform’s first year hosting the weekly game.

However, the 2023 Black Friday game between the Dolphins and New York Jets drew an average audience of 9.6M viewers, peaking at 11.8M. The game didn’t quite hit the mark, likely because Aaron Rodgers didn’t play, but with a more competitive matchup, the expectations for that kind of game are close to 20M viewers.