NFL's 2024 season will illustrate hand-off to major streamers

The way sports fans watch their favorite teams continues to evolve as more streaming companies enter the entertainment arena, with more ways to watch than ever before.

Yahoo Finance senior entertainment reporter Alexandra Canal joins Market Domination to break down the new NFL season TV schedule and what it reveals about the sports broadcast landscape.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.

This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

When the NFL first announced Amazon's Prime video as the home of Thursday night football, it felt like a seismic shift for how fans watched games.

Three years later, there are still plenty of games available on broadcast television, but streaming does slowly keep taking bigger pieces of that pie joining us.

Now you find this is Alexander Can now with a look at the landscape as we go into football season, right?

And it was only three years ago that the NFL signed that new media rights, still welcoming and Amazon Prime in for Thursday night football.

But at the same time, you have to remember that more than any other league.

The NFL also loves television and when they re signed and signed on Amazon, they also up to their agreements with some of those other traditional broadcasters like CBS, Fox NBC, ABC.

So there's this idea for the NFL that they want to make sure that they are everywhere.

Anything all at once.

That really seems to be the driving here.

I did just get a chance to speak with Hans Schroeder.

He's the executive VP and coo of NFL media and he told me that what we're seeing with the media rights landscape is more of an evolution rather than a revolutionary concept at this point in time.

He said for the NFL, it starts with that broad reach of our games.

That's why 85% of the games they are available on free to air platforms.

But they also so are recognizing that people are on other forms of distribution there on other digital screens and they need to be smart in the way that they approach those different platforms as well.

And we've seen that there's been more of an embrace of one off games as well.

If you think about Netflix, they are going to be airing exclusive Christmas Day game.

Amazon Prime is a Black Friday game.

This is something that the NFL can do to one increase the fees that they're receiving.

But also again, feed into that concept of wherever fans are.

Now, I did ask about whether or not we'll see more one off games.

He said that's probably more of the exception rather than the rule.

They want to be careful about what they're really experimenting with at this point.

But it just feels like especially after the Olympics and how that multi platform strategy seem to work so well.

They that there's an opportunity for the NFL to really lean into that as well.

The Gamification of the games, you know, we have the toy story game Nickelodeon game that seems to be a play to bring in younger consumers.

So there's just a lot of experimentation going on, especially when we're in this moment of disruption within media at large.

And that just means you're gonna have to subscribe to quite a few platforms if you want to be able to watch every single game in its entirety of the season.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.