It might be five years from now, it might be 10, but the day is coming when one household will be made up entirely of people who digest an NFL Sunday each in their own unique way.
This family might have a younger kid consuming the sport on a Nickelodeon broadcast, a teenager only watching highlights on his phone, a mom keeping track of her office fantasy team through an app and a dad flipping over to a sports gambling show on a Megacast presentation. And then maybe grandpa sitting on the couch watching it the old-fashioned way—from start to finish on an over-the-air network.
How we get there over the next decade is unpredictable. When we get there is unpredictable. What it’ll look like after we get there is unpredictable, too.
But over the last couple months, the NFL made a rather handsome bet that we will get there. You can slice up the NFL’s 11-year, $113 billion set of media rights contracts that were announced last week a bunch of different ways—and we will in the column—but the overriding thing within their details isn’t hard to understand.
The NFL believes the world is going to keep changing.
These new deals allow the league to keep changing with it.
“We know how the market is changing, especially with young people and how they’re just on their phone or their iPad,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft said from his office on Friday. “I think that is the biggest difference in what we’ve done. And it’s interesting, if you look at it, your next big thing will be more interactivity and customization of the product that hadn’t been possible. ESPN has done a customized alternative viewing experience, which was really focused on sports betting. CBS used Nickelodeon to provide a youth-oriented game experience, which was, I don’t know if you saw that, but I watched it, I thought it was great.
“NBC pushed the Next Gen stats to really new levels and Fox has led the way in free-to-play ancillary games that attracted millions of casual fans. And then on Thursday, Amazon experimented with multiple alternative streams of the game, which included a Twitch-like EA Sports environment for those fans who love esports. … Building in these alternatives for the future, it’s pretty cool that we’re able to do this.”
Now, like a lot of you, I’m cool with how it is now.
But I also know my kids might not be. And that’s why these deals are the way they are.
The world of media has never evolved or changed faster than it has over the last 20 years and, with these contracts, the NFL’s telling you to buckle up, because they’re planning to be a part of accelerating what’s already changed the way most people watch games.
