Whatever its problems, the NFL possesses a wizardly skill at conjuring up new money.
Yahoo paid the league around $20 million for the global streaming rights to last October’s Buffalo-Jacksonville game from London.
Millions more are likely to flow from a possible deal to stream all three London games next season. Eventually, streaming rights will become a very big profit center.
The money magic has, of late, come from the “Thursday Night Football” package, and more will soon flow with a new deal, for at least the 2016 season, to be announced before the Super Bowl.
For eight years, the NFL put its Thursday night games solely on NFL Network rather than sell them to an established network that was willing to pay bundles.
Still, having the games enabled the channel to raise its profile and allowed it to increase its monthly subscriber fees.
But when the league felt compelled to reach a wider audience and turn Thursdays into a pro football night (college football had already done something similar), it solicited broadcasters that could promote the games to a general audience far larger than the cable niche that NFL Network serves.
CBS bought the rights in 2014 for $275 million and renewed them in 2015 for $300 million. The network televised eight of the games and simulcast them on NFL Network. The remaining eight games were exclusive to NFL Network. CBS produced all 16 and put its lead announcers, Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, on the broadcasts.
The deal has worked. The eight games CBS carried averaged 17.6 million viewers in 2015, up from 16.1 million a year earlier. The comparable games on NFL Network had 8 million watching in 2013.
Now CBS is facing off against NBC and Fox to win a one- or two-year contract that may cost $350 million-$400 million annually. Fox was reported to have made a “stiff” offer but has never commented publicly on it.
ESPN dropped out because it wants nothing to do with the simulcasting and recognized that the NFL wants a broadcast network. The networks and the league declined to comment.
CBS deserves consideration to retain the Thursday night deal, having marketed the games as promised and more than doubling viewership. It used its Thursday night stalwart comedy, “The Big Bang Theory,” to strengthen its Monday night schedule. Making sure the free world knew it had Thursday night games became a major companywide priority at CBS.
But there is logic in the league’s shopping it to another buyer to see, if nothing else, which one it might sell a long-term deal to, whenever that happens.
NBC seems to have a strong case to succeed CBS because it would be able to use the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which start Aug. 5, as a promotional platform for the games on multiple channels and online. That heavy promotion would end in 17 days, a few weeks before the NFL season starts.
Still, if the league wants to keep building preseason awareness, the Olympics would appear to be an irresistible tool. And NBC is familiar with Thursdays; it televises the opening-night game on Thursday, so adding eight games would provide continuity through late October.
NBC and CBS are strong in prime time. NBC is ranked No. 1 among viewers ages 18-49. CBS is the most-viewed overall.
If any of the networks has a reason to overbid for the Thursday night games, it would be Fox. It is the least viewed of the Big Four networks and is ranked third this season in the 18-49 demographic; it might want to play an aggressive defense by keeping its rivals from getting hold of the games and guaranteeing itself a prime-time victory on eight Thursdays.
There is another option that the league is exploring, said two people familiar with the negotiating who were not authorized to speak publicly: Expand the package to 10 games and split them between two networks. In that way, two networks would be marketing Thursday nights, just as two networks promote and televise Sunday afternoons.
It has been clear since 2014 that the league has used the sale of Thursday night games as an annual experiment in which it declined to commit to a long-term solution as the media landscape changed, between cord-cutting and myriad digital alternatives.
The league’s Sunday and Monday deals with CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN cannot be changed through the early 2020s, but the Thursday package is an evolving project that could be sold to a nontraditional outlet like Google.
As Brian Rolapp, the league’s executive vice president for media, said last year, “In this day and age, to lock into one model isn’t the smartest thing anymore.”
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