After going with two games this past season, the NFL will again schedule a Christmas Day tripleheader this season.
The NFL announced Monday that it will schedule three games on Christmas this coming season, with two airing on Netflix and the third on Amazon Prime Video. As Christmas falls on a Thursday this year, the Amazon game will be part of the network’s Thursday Night Football package.
The league scheduled only two games on Christmas last season, both on Netflix. Under the NFL’s deal with Netflix, the streamer is entitled to at least one Christmas game per season, meaning that the league could have conceivably set aside one of the three games for linear television. Instead, the traditional broadcast networks will be shut out of the Christmas slate for a second-straight year.
Last year’s Christmas doubleheader averaged 24 million viewers on Netflix (including local over-the-air simulcasts in the home markets), down from a three-game average of more than 28 million the prior year, when all three games aired on broadcast. If down from last year, the two games ranked as the most-watched NFL contests to ever air primarily on a streaming service.
Amazon, which airs more exclusive NFL games than any of the other streamers, has thus far missed out on the record audiences enjoyed by Netflix and Peacock. Its largest NFL audience — more than 22 million for a Steelers-Ravens Wild Card game this past January — trails the two Christmas games on Netflix last year and Peacock’s Wild Card game two years ago. A Christmas night game figures to change that.
NFL executive Hans Schroeder said last year that the league planned only to schedule two games on the holiday this season, much as the prior year, when he said the league had no plans to schedule any games on Christmas because it fell on a Wednesday.
