The latest development in the NFL media rights saga is that YouTube is now the frontrunner for the league’s new five-game package.
Google-owned YouTube is nearing a deal to acquire the five-game media rights package being shopped by the NFL, Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports reported Thursday, with the two sides having entered a contract review stage that is viewed as a prelude to a deal. John Ourand of Puck later characterized YouTube as being “a frontrunner.”
The five-game slate is comprised of four windows that the NFL freed up as part of its sale of NFL Network to ESPN — NFL Network airs seven games per season, but as part of that sale, four of those will now come from ESPN’s existing inventory — plus the Week 1 International Series game from Australia, which the league originally planned to sell standalone.
As Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reported over the weekend, the NFL is offering bidders for the five-game package a “menu” of options from which to pick, including the Australia game, a new Thanksgiving Eve game, a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve window that had not been previously reported.
A deal with YouTube would presumably address a mounting backlash in Washington against sporting events on “paywalled streamers” — to use Fox Corporation’s terminology in its letter to the FCC — assuming the company would make its games available for free, as it did for the Week 1 game from Brazil last season.
In addition to YouTube, Netflix and Fox were also said to be in the running for the package, per Florio. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in an earnings call Thursday that the streamer is “in discussions right now” with the NFL and sees an “opportunity to expand the relationship.”
Jessica Toonkel and Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Netflix is interested in expanding its current two-game Christmas Day package to a four-game slate that includes the Thanksgiving Eve and International Series games. That is still theoretically possible if YouTube wins the bidding for the five-game package, depending on which games on the “menu” it selects.
And there is no reason to believe the league is limited in its ability to carve out new inventory, especially as it plans to renegotiate all of its media rights deals by the start of the new season.
To that end, Alex Sherman of CNBC provided more details about the extent to which the NFL and its network partners differ on the size of the league’s expected rights fee hike. The NFL is said to be pursuing an increase in the triple-digits, while the networks are said to prefer something closer to 25 percent. That fits with his previous report that referred to an increase of 50-60 percent as being the “midpoint” between what the league is seeking and what it is being offered as part of ongoing negotiations with Paramount.
