Peacock will carry an NFL wild-card playoff game in prime time on Jan. 13, the league and NBCUniversal announced Monday. The Wall Street Journal first broke the news. Here’s what you need to know:
- The NFL and Peacock reached a one-year deal for the streaming service to carry the first exclusive live-streamed NFL playoff game during the upcoming season.
- It will follow a late afternoon wild-card game on NBC and Peacock at 8 p.m. ET.
- Terms of the deal were not announced. The Wall Street Journal reported it was in the range of $110 million.
The Athletic’s instant analysis:
What this means for NFL viewers
This is significant news for NFL viewers. It’s one thing to have an NFL regular-season game exclusive to a streamer (as Peacock has this year in Week 16 with Bills–Chargers) but a playoff game behind a paywall is really a brave new world for the NFL.
The Peacock exclusive wild-card game will immediately follow a late afternoon NFL wild-card playoff game on NBC and Peacock on Jan. 13. Unquestionably, the NFL will assign Peacock whatever it considers the lowest-potential viewership but watch out for the law of unintended consequences: It might turn out to be the most competitive game of the weekend.
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Clearly, the NFL wants to do long-term business with companies with streaming services, as NBCUniversal has here because it’s still uncharted territory as far as a ceiling on money. I think this is going to tick off a lot of NFL fans when it happens. I also think the league is willing to deal with the fallout for a nine-figure check. — Deitsch
Why now?
Peacock lost $704 million last year, according to its parent Comcast. And the service is not alone. Outside of Netflix, streamers lose loads of money, whether it’s CBS’ Paramount+ or Disney’s ESPN+, which also has an exclusive regular-season game this season.
These companies are desperately moving to turn the streamers on to a path to profitability as they navigate the treacherous transition from linear TV to digital. And to get more signups, they need more high-quality, exclusive content. Peacock has 22 million subscribers, so it needs dramatically more to escape its red ink.
Football followers may not like it, but increasingly, more valuable games will be going behind a streaming paywall, something fans of other sports like soccer and tennis long ago found out. It’s hard to see the AFC and NFC conference title games, or dare one say the Super Bowl, going this way barring a complete collapse of linear TV.
But if Peacock has a playoff game, Paramount and ESPN+ surely want one too. And maybe more. — Kaplan
Backstory
Peacock is exclusively carrying an NFL regular-season game for the first time this season as the Buffalo Bills visit the Chargers at 8 p.m. on Dec. 23. Peacock’s exclusive wild-card and regular season games will be broadcast on NBC stations in the two cities of the competing teams. They will also be available with NFL+ on mobile devices.
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(Photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty)