The NFL’s Thanksgiving Eve trial balloon already appears to have borne fruit, with Netflix said to be pursuing that and other inventory in an expanded rights deal.
Netflix is seeking to expand its current relationship with the NFL to include a game on the night before Thanksgiving and an international series game that would “likely” take place in the opening week of the season, according to Jessica Toonkel and Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal.
The NFL announced last week that its 49ers-Rams game from Melbourne will take place on the Thursday of Opening Week, with no network affiliation given. According to John Ourand of Puck, the league had originally planned to sell rights to the game standalone, but shifted instead to including it in a package of four or five games. One can surmise that is the package Netflix is now pursuing.
Unlike the Week 1 Melbourne game, the potential Thanksgiving Eve game has yet to be officially announced — but the fact that it was floated publicly in the first place, and that the league acknowledged the possibility in an on-the-record statement, is confirmation in all but name.
Netflix is entering the final year of a three-year contract to carry Christmas Day NFL games. The streamer has aired two Christmas games in each of its first two seasons, but contractually, the league can choose to award it just one. The WSJ report described Netflix as seeking to expand its current package from two-to-four games, making it a virtual lock that the two others would be drawn from its existing Christmas inventory. But one cannot totally rule out the possibility that a fourth game would come from a different point on the calendar.
It is not clear how many of the games in a potential Netflix package, if any, would count toward the new inventory the league freed up as part of its deal to sell NFL Network to Disney. That deal resulted in four game windows that previously aired on NFL Network becoming ‘free agents’ the league could shop on the open market.
It stands to reason that the Netflix Christmas games, which are preexisting inventory, would not count toward that total. The Week 1 International Series game has been described as being in addition to, rather than part of, the four-game set. Depending on how the league characterizes the new Thanksgiving Eve game, it could still have three or potentially all four of those game windows available to sell to another streamer like Google-owned YouTube.
Assuming four-game packages each for Netflix and another streamer, plus newly-renegotiated deals with its main broadcast partners, the NFL could be selling seven or more packages in the coming months.
While it is no surprise that Netflix is interested in extending and expanding its relationship with the NFL, the news Monday comes within days of John Ourand of Puck reporting that the streamer had to offer make-goods to advertisers because its Christmas Day NFL viewership fell short of guarantees. That is nothing new in sports television, including the NFL, but it is not the kind of headline one usually associates with the NFL’s glamour properties.
Last year’s Netflix Christmas slate was dragged down by subpar seasons for each of the participating teams, with Cowboys-Commanders falling short of the 20 million mark. Per Ourand, viewership fell 18 percent below the guarantees Netflix made to advertisers. The resulting make-goods accounted for ‘several’ of the ads Netflix aired during the Major League Baseball Opening Night game last week.
