An NFL game airs exclusively on Peacock for the first time as the Bills face the Chargers Saturday night; here is a media-focused preview of how to watch and what the ratings might look like.
How to watch the Bills-Chargers NFL game on Peacock
Date: Saturday, December 23
Time: 8:20 PM ET
Linear networks: WGRZ-NBC (Buffalo), KNBC (Los Angeles)
Streaming options: Peacock ($5.99/mo)
($5.99/mo)The full NFL schedule is available here. (If you subscribe to Peacock via the preceding link, this site may receive a commission.)
Backstory
It seems somewhat out-of-character for the National Football League to be so gung-ho about putting games exclusively on streaming services. No league has a greater commitment to broadcast television than the NFL. With a mere antenna, one has access to all of the Sunday windows, every week of Monday Night Football (at least this season), and — traditionally — all of the playoffs. Contrast that with the other cable-dependent leagues, whose broadcast television footprints are limited to a small sampling of games. For those leagues, the idea of putting exclusive games behind a streaming paywall is in keeping with a decades-long strategy to prioritize media rights revenue over reach. The NFL has not had to make those compromises, as it has been able to generate massive rights fees without having to prop up cable networks or streaming services in need of programming to lure subscribers. Yet here is the NFL, playing a game Saturday on a third-different direct-to-subscriber streaming service this season.
Peacock is one of the smallest platforms to ever carry an NFL game. It had 28 million subscribers as of Q3 of this year, per Comcast — ahead of ESPN+ (26 million), but well below the more than 150 million that are said to subscribe to Amazon Prime Video (a figure badly inflated by the fact that Prime Video is included with a general Amazon Prime subscription). By comparison, when NFL Network began airing games in 2006, it was said to be in 41 million homes. (ESPN was said to be in 44.3 million when it became the first cable network to air NFL games in 1987.)
While Peacock and ESPN+ are on even footing, the same cannot be said of their inventory. ESPN+ has thus far aired two games, both 9:30 AM ET matchups from London — typically the most disposable, least-important games on the NFL calendar, outside of the preseason and the Pro Bowl. Peacock gets a primetime game tonight, and then a playoff game next month. While it will certainly grow its subscriber base due to those games (which is of course the point of carrying the games in the first place), the NFL will be limiting its potential audience in a way that has not been seen since NFL Network’s early years. Not only is that out of character for the league, but even the lesser of the “Big Four” leagues have yet to put playoff games behind the direct-to-subscriber paywall.
Like Thursday Night Football on Amazon, Peacock’s NFL games will be Nielsen-measured. It was not immediately clear whether Peacock will include local over-the-air simulcasts in its figures, as Amazon does. NBC has used Adobe Analytics to measure its streaming viewership, and those figures have been respectable. Earlier this month, the network touted a record streaming audience of 2.3 million for a simulcast of Eagles-Cowboys (the traditional Nielsen audience was 24.2 million). Assuming that most of that 2.3 million watched on Peacock (figures also include streams on other NFL and NBC streaming platforms), that is a semi-encouraging sign. It means a sizable audience is already choosing to stream games on Peacock when they have the opportunity to watch on traditional television. Those are upwards of two million viewers who will not need to change their viewing habits.
Of course, two million is merely a good head start. Outside of the early morning games from London, a passable NFL audience starts around the nine million mark. There are always occasional games in the six, seven or eight million range, but once you get below that figure, you are talking about numbers that would reasonably be considered subterranean by the league’s lofty standards. Peacock will thus need to quadruple its highest-end viewership to avoid delivering an audience that is noticeably poor. The NFL could look to another form of football for reassurance; Peacock has delivered linear-level audiences for English Premier League matches, including nearly a million viewers for Chelsea-Liverpool in August. The bar is much higher for the NFL, but nevertheless that indicates Peacock can draw on the level of a linear TV network.
A quality game would help matters, and it certainly seemed in the offseason that Bills-Chargers would qualify. Instead, Los Angeles enters Saturday coming off of a uniquely humiliating loss to the mediocre Raiders. The Bills are showing signs of resurgence after a slow start and humbled Dallas last week. A close game is obviously what the league is hoping for, but given the most recent results for these teams, a blowout seems likelier than usual. NBC this week announced that it will carry the fourth quarter of Bills-Chargers without any commercial breaks. That gesture may seem empty if all viewers get is uninterrupted garbage time.
Ratings prediction
So far this season, the smallest Nielsen-measured NFL audience was 4.29 million for a Ravens-Titans game from London on NFL Network. (As ESPN+ is not Nielsen-rated, no viewership was ever disclosed for the Falcons-Jaguars game from London Week 4, almost certainly the least-watched game of the season.) Outside of those early morning International Series games, the smallest audience was just shy of seven million for Saints-Panthers on ESPN and ESPN2 in Week 2, a game that overlapped with competing action on ABC. The least-watched standalone window was Vikings-Bengals on NFL Network last Saturday, which averaged 7.53 million.
NFL regular season: Bills-Chargers (8:20p Sat Peacock). Prediction: 5.49 million viewers.
