It’s playoff football’s oldest and most wonderful tradition: Fire up the grill, grab a few drinks, stake out your sweet spot on the couch…and turn on Amazon Prime Video.
You already know the NFL is going all-in on streaming, with Thursday’s regular season games only available on Prime Video. If you don’t want to pay for Prime during the week, there are a dozen more games waiting for you. But the league has upped the ante in the past few years in an effort to attract a younger, more tech-savvy audience, putting precious postseason games on streaming services. Suddenly, the urge to jump into the fast-moving water becomes more urgent.
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Two years ago, the NFL debuted streaming games against the Dolphins-Chiefs on Peacock, betting that NFL fans would be willing to sign up for the service to watch Patrick Mahomes play. When the NFL put the always-dirty AFC North matchup between the Ravens and Steelers on Prime last year, the historic significance of the playoff game was even more compelling than its then-current version.
(Trivia: We livestreamed the first-ever online NFL game on Yahoo Sports, a 2015 Bills-Jaguars game in Europe. It’s safe to say that this year’s Bills-Jaguars playoff game will probably be better than the 9:00 a.m. mid-season game in the East.)
The Bears and Packers have met 212 times since 1921, but they had only met twice in the playoffs before.
(Todd Rosenberg via Getty Images)
This year, the Saturday Night Prime game in the wild-card round will be the Packers vs. Bears, the league’s oldest and most competitive game, which has only happened twice before in the playoffs despite being more than 100 years old. It’s a massive game, which begs the question: How did this season’s Wild Card round end on Prime?
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According to the Chicago Sun-Times and Puck, it’s a scheduling necessity…and, also, a league favorite. All five of the league’s broadcast partners — CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Prime — want to watch two of this weekend’s exciting matchups, either the 49ers vs. Eagles or the Packers vs. Bears. The NFL likes to schedule its most high-profile games late on Sunday afternoons and chose to schedule the 49ers-Eagles game live on Fox.
The league is also leaning toward scheduling a 4-5 game in Monday night’s playoff slot — this year the Steelers vs. Texans or the Rams vs. Panthers. Since Pittsburgh-Houston is the more interesting option (sorry, Panthers fans, but you know it’s true), the AFC gets the nod there.
However, this creates another conundrum – if the NFL schedules an AFC team on Saturday night, it would create a potentially serious rest mismatch for the winner. As a result, the AFC picked up two more spots on Sunday, giving the league a choice between the Rams vs. Panthers and Packers vs. Bears on Saturday night’s Prime Game. Since many of the league’s other broadcast partners have big games in the final weeks of the regular season, and the league wants to keep all of its broadcast partners happy… Packers-Bears are on Prime, baby!
The NFL understands that every live game results in a short-term ratings drop, but perhaps a very short-term one: the 2023 Dolphins-Chiefs set the record for the most live game in U.S. history with 23 million viewers. (Comparing streaming viewership is often like comparing Apples to Bulldogs, but the 2024 Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match on Netflix now appears to be the winner with 38 million viewers.) The 2024 Steelers-Ravens averaged more than 22 million viewers, far more than almost every other sporting event except other NFL (and the occasional college) games.
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So, what does all this emphasis on streaming mean to you, a loyal NFL viewer? Well, more streaming services charge more, but you already knew that. The unstoppable growth of streaming continues, with the NFL clearly showing interest in spreading its offerings across multiple networks and services.
Now that there are no objective differences in gameplay, streaming quality, or user experience once the game begins, between “broadcasting” games on most TVs and streaming games, all that’s left for the NFL is to normalize access to streaming services as easily as access to broadcast games. The best way to normalize it is to put some of the league’s most important assets, namely all-or-nothing playoff games, on these streaming services.
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By next year, this will all be normal and we won’t even need to write columns like: “Why the NFL is going all-in on streaming.” Whether this is good or bad news for you may depend on whether you remember the 1990s… or your Prime password. But for now, don’t worry – the later rounds of the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl will continue to air on easy-to-watch, free-to-air television.
at present.
