NFL, Peacock prep for first streaming-only playoff game

Editor’s note: This article was written by Ben Fischer and first appeared in Sports Business Journal, the industry’s leading source of sports business news, events and data.

NBC Sports and the NFL are preparing for another inflection point in the sports industry’s transition from linear TV to streaming on Saturday, when an NFL playoff game will appear exclusively on a streaming service — Peacock — for the first time.

Streaming is not new to the NFL. The first streaming-only NFL game came on Yahoo in 2015, and it’s become routine in the last two seasons under Amazon Prime’s exclusive rights to the “Thursday night Football” package.

But the NFL postseason brings unique value and viewership scale. Also, the prestige of the playoffs makes this a critical test of both the NFL’s long-term efforts to balance streaming growth with the reach-first, broadcast-first approach that’s fueled its growth since the 1960s, and of NBCUniversal’s plan to build Peacock subscriptions with sports.

Consider this: Last year, the least-watched NFL playoff game drew 21.8 million viewers. Even if Peacock is down 30% from that, it will still be enough to become the most-viewed streaming game ever. (As always with the NFL, streaming “exclusive” is a term of art; NFL rules will still require it to be shown over-the-air in the participating teams’ core markets.)

Both NBC and NFL executives say they’ll run back the strategy first implemented on Dec. 23, when NBC Sports aired a 4:30 p.m. ET game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburgh Steelers on the over-the-air broadcast network that aggressively promoted the evening game that aired nationally on NBC-owned Peacock only. While the Peacock game between the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Chargers that night drew just 7.3 million viewers, those executives said that gambit was a success.

“That’s a really unique opportunity to use a partner that has, obviously, a very widely distributed broadcast network and use that to promote digital,” said Hans Schroeder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media. “We were really excited about that, and wrapping around that is going to be a very broad promotional plan.”

• Want to receive a nightly roundup of sports business news to your inbox? Sign up for Sports Business Journal’s Unpacks Lite newsletter below.

Schroeder said NFL fans are already well-conditioned around streaming, but “we take nothing for granted, that we need to continue to build that awareness and makes sure fans know where to go at 8 o’clock next Saturday.”

NBC Sports will tap into the full range of NBCUniversal assets to promote the game on Peacock, said NBC Sports President Rick Cordella. “If you watch a platform of NBC Universal, you’re going to come across it, whether it be the ‘Today’ show or other sports programs,” Cordella said.

NBC Sports wants viewers to subscribe to Peacock as soon as possible, but executives understand that many won’t take that step until the final hours. On the Dec. 23 game, sign-ups continued well into the exclusive game window. “I think if you talk about people in any endeavor in life, they don’t do things until they have to,” Cordella said.

NBC paid about $110 million for the wild-card game, with subscription growth as the key metric to evaluate that decision after the fact. Peacock is counting on sports for a boost in the streaming wars. With 30 million subscribers, just a small fraction of market leaders Netflix and Prime Video, the service needs the game to post a big number — and for those people to keep subscribing.

To that end, Peacock is launching a new comedy series “Ted” (a prequel series of the Seth MacFarlane movies about a guy and his come-to-life teddy bear) off the game, and promoting the second season of “The Traitors” reality competition show.

“We’ll look back and say, we acquired a certain number of subscribers that came because we had this NFL wild-card game, and how did these subscribers behave?” Cordella said. “Did they watch content? Did they go and subscribe for multiple months? Did they churn out immediately? Those are the things we’ll look at later this year.”

Like on the Dec. 23 game, the fourth quarter will again air without traditional commercials. Rather, executives said, there will be three longer sponsored content breaks, which Schroeder called part of the ongoing innovation with game production — balancing revenue generation with trying new ways to enhance viewing and prove the value of streaming.