NEW YORK — The $113 billion deal to telecast NFL games through 2033 is head-swimmingly large — until you consider that the very survival of broadcast networks as we know them may depend upon it.
The deal announced by the NFL and media companies last Thursday spreads professional football content broadly, with CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN and Amazon all getting pieces, and locks it in at a time little else can attract such a wide audience.
“If you think of the future of network television, there is nothing more important to it than the NFL,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst for LightShed Partners, an industry research firm.
During the current television season, the eight most-watched recurring programs are football: the game “windows” on Sunday afternoon and Sunday or Thursday nights, the Nielsen company said. NFL football accounts for 12 of the 20 most popular programs, including highlights packages.
A decade ago, there were seven football entries in the top 20, Nielsen said. In 2000, when “ER” was the most popular program on television, football accounted for two of the top 20.
The economics are simple for broadcast networks: the bigger the audience, the more they can charge to run commercials. Yet the games are also important to a network’s identity. With viewers cutting cords and spreading out among streaming services, there are no better platforms to promote their latest comedies and dramas.
Live sports is now the top reason people cite for subscribing to cable or satellite television hook-ups, said Dennis Deninger, a longtime ESPN employee and now a professor in the Falk College of Sport & Human Dynamics at Syracuse University.
“They are banking on the interest in sports to help them survive,” Deninger said. Without sports, networks would be left chiefly with entertainment and news. People, especially young viewers, consider broadcast networks less important to filling those needs, he said.
Networks may have no idea what comedies people will laugh to in 2030, but the NFL deal at least gives them certainty that their most popular programming option will remain, said Daniel Durbin, director of the USC-Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society.
Pro football ratings did drop this season, and the Super Bowl’s audience of 92 million people wasn’t near the all-time high of 114.4 million in 2015, Nielsen said.
Still, nothing else on television reaches 92 million people. Nothing comes anywhere close. What responsible media executive wouldn’t listen when the NFL comes calling?
“Hockey and curling are not going to get it for you,” Durbin said.
