Christmas arrives at a particularly eventful time for both the NFL and NBA, the former as it begins yet another prominent new streaming partnership and the latter as it deals with yet another round of concerns about its ratings. How will the leagues fare on the holiday this year?
Why the NFL will be pleased even if viewership declines on Netflix
Much has been made in recent years of the NFL taking Christmas away from the NBA, but as has been noted on this site previously, the NFL has always dominated Christmas viewership whenever it has played on the holiday. The key change in recent years is that the NFL has begun targeting Christmas as a key date on its calendar, rather than scheduling games on the holiday when it happens to fall on its usual days of operation. First, that was by expanding the Christmas slate from two to three games. This year, it is by playing on Christmas even though the date falls on a Wednesday, when the league has rarely ever played games.
The NFL’s rationale for its expanded Christmas presence is simple. In the out-of-home era, the Christmas Day audience is too large to pass up. Indeed, last year’s three Christmas games averaged nearly 30 million viewers across CBS, FOX and ABC. Yet the league for this Christmas is putting a ceiling on the possible audience by scheduling the games exclusively for a streaming service — and not Amazon Prime Video, to whom most NFL fans are now acclimated, but Netflix. To be sure, Netflix is the streamer of streamers, familiar to Americans for generations as a home of popular original series, beloved network reruns, and in an earlier time, a convenient alternative to Blockbuster. Never before, however, has it been a requirement in order to watch the big game.
The most-watched NFL game ever on a streaming service was the Dolphins-Chiefs Wild Card playoff game on Peacock in January, which averaged a Nielsen-measured audience of nearly 23 million viewers (including over-the-air simulcasts in Miami and Kansas City). That was a massive success for the streamer and for the NFL, but it was also the least-watched of last season’s playoff games by a decent margin. There is simply no way to put a game behind a streaming paywall and not sacrifice a few million viewers.
The NFL’s rationale for playing on Christmas may have originally been the massive audiences available on the holiday, but media rights revenue will always take precedence. (Ratings are nice for PR, but rights fees actually go into people’s bank accounts.) The NFL’s three-year deal with Netflix to carry Christmas Day games is worth $70-$80 million per game, meaning that this year’s doubleheader will bring the league upwards of $160 million in additional media rights revenue — a figure that is certainly worth the loss of viewership that is almost certain to result.
Expect that loss of viewership to be modest. While few are taking seriously the viewership Netflix announced for its Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight last month — over 100 million worldwide — there is at least some recent precedent for Netflix drawing the kind of mass audience that it and the league are hoping for Wednesday. Given the teams involved and their records, to say nothing of the Beyonce halftime performance in the late window, it is highly likely that the games will challenge the streaming record set by Dolphins-Chiefs in January — even if falling a few million short of last year’s over-the-air Christmas windows. (It is also worth noting that in the four home markets, the local team’s game will also be available on CBS.)
If viewership lands in the low-to-mid 20 million range, and especially if one or both games sets a new streaming era record, any modest decline in viewership will be immaterial to the NFL.
Predictions
— Chiefs-Steelers (1p Wed Netflix, CBS in KC and PIT). Prediction: 24.71 million.
— Ravens-Texans (4:30p Wed Netflix, CBS in BAL and HOU). Prediction: 23.99 million.
Why NBA Christmas viewership is almost certain to buck the league’s downward trend
This Christmas will likely offer a strange inversion of the status quo. It is likely (though not certain) that the NFL will see a decline from last year. It is a virtual lock that the NBA, whose ratings have been the talk of the industry, will see a fairly sizable increase.
To begin with, even though the NFL is truly encroaching on the NBA this season by playing Christmas games on a Wednesday, there are only two games on the schedule. That means less competition than the past two years, and more importantly, a fully unopposed primetime window in which the NBA has slotted the two biggest stars of its era — LeBron James and Stephen Curry.
Neither the Lakers nor the Warriors are drawing viewers like they used to — part and parcel of an NBA season that is down double-digits thus far — but there is still no matchup that can move the needle as well. The last time the teams met on Christmas was in James’ first season with the Lakers six years ago, a matchup that drew more than 10 million viewers in the same primetime window. That figure is out of reach now, but anything above 6.1 million would be the league’s largest regular season audience in four years, and anything above 7.2 million would be its top such audience since before the COVID hiatus. Given the Lakers and Warriors each drew in the neighborhood of 4-5 million opposite the NFL last Christmas, it seems reasonable to expect this year’s games to at least hit a four or five year high.
For all the negativity surrounding NBA ratings this season, Christmas Day should comfortably buck the trend. Even if viewership comes in under expectations, it is fairly impossible for the numbers to be as low as last year, when ABC carried only two of the five games and neither primetime window hit the two million mark opposite the NFL. With ABC simulcasting all five games and no primetime NFL competition, it is far more likely that viewership will increase by a significant amount, as last year’s average of 2.85 million was so far below the norm that a simple reversion to the mean would result in gains of 40 to 50 percent.
Can viewership rebound to the 2022 level of 4.3 million? ABC simulcast all five games that season, but actually faced more competition as that was the first year the NFL put three games on the holiday. Yet that year was also a stronger one for the NBA generally, and the league had the Lakers, Celtics and Warriors playing separately in consecutive games. One negative of pairing the Lakers and Warriors is that the other windows do not have particularly strong anchors; the Celtics face a slow-starting Sixers squad, the Mavericks face the Timberwolves in a not-very-anticipated Western Conference Finals rematch, and the Knicks face a promising Spurs squad that has not quite yet broken through on the national stage.
Predictions
— Spurs-Knicks (Noon Wed ABC, ESPN and ESPN2). Prediction: 3.20 million.
— Mavericks-Timberwolves (2:30p Wed ABC and ESPN). Prediction: 3.13 million.
— Sixers-Celtics (5p Wed ABC and ESPN). Prediction: 4.01 million.
— Lakers-Warriors (8p Wed ABC and ESPN). Prediction: 6.79 million.
— Suns-Nuggets (10:30p Wed ABC and ESPN). Prediction: 2.21 million.
