Twenty years ago, the NFL caused a seismic shift in its broadcast footprint when it allowed ABC to move Monday Night Football to its sister network, ESPN.
Before then, 100% of NFL games were shown on broadcast television. Moving its flagship, primetime broadcast behind a cable paywall was a big risk at the time. While ESPN was incredibly popular at the time, it was only present in fewer than 100 million homes, whereas broadcast TV sets were present in nearly every home.
Today, having just one game sit behind a paywall almost seems quaint, as the NFL has fully embraced spreading its broadcast rights across as many partners as want a piece. Now the NFL has high-profile games on Amazon Prime, Peacock, and Netflix, as well as ESPN.
ESPN leads the way with 19 Monday Night Football regular season games to be broadcast and streamed on the ESPN App (ESPN is also simulcasting the Super Bowl for the first time in its history), though 10 of those games will also be broadcast on ABC. NFL Network has seven exclusives, including five of the league’s international games.
Prime has the rights to 16 regular-season Thursday Night Football games, FBSchedules noted.
The league’s biggest experiments will be broadcast on Netflix, as the league will stream a Week 1 matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers from Australia before it tries its first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game on Wednesday, Nov. 25, to go along with its new Christmas Day two-game slate. All told, Netflix has five games this season.
Peacock also has the rights to one game this season.
So if you are a fan who insists on seeing every game, get ready to pay up.
NFL fans pay hundreds extra to watch streaming
For NFL fans, the largest benefit to having the NFL exclusively on the Big 4 broadcast networks was that watching was essentially free. If you had a television and rabbit ears, you could watch the whole season slate.
Today, with nearly 40 games exclusively behind paywalls, it takes a lot more effort, and money, to watch the NFL.
It will cost the average NFL fan $207.80 to watch all of the streamed games this season, according to data compiled by digital security website All About Cookies. That averages out to about $51.95 per month.
And that’s just the streamed games.
“Most NFL games are broadcast for free over-the-air on channels like FOX and CBS,” All About Cookies explained. “However, the specific games available on those free channels differ from one media market to the next, meaning that fans living outside of their favorite team’s home market may not be able to watch their squad play on their local affiliate station.”
That is, unless they also spring for the out-of-market packages.
It will cost the average NFL fan $207.80 to watch all of the streamed games this season.
Scott Taetsch / Getty Images
It costs nearly $1,000 to watch the NFL
The NFL’s regional broadcast model has always had its drawbacks, namely the fact that fans were only able to see a small sliver of the full slate of games being played every Sunday.
The NFL came up with a solution for that when it launched the NFL Sunday Ticket more than 30 years ago. But Sunday Ticket has seen some price increases in recent years, according to IMDB.
Currently, there are two ways to subscribe to Sunday Ticket.
NFL Sunday Ticket pricing starts at $240 for new subscribers for the season, while returning users pay $378 as a YouTube TV add-on and $480 as a stand-alone product without YouTube.
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When combined with YouTube TV, which features all of the cable games, it costs $609.95 for new users to watch all of the broadcast games and $792.95 for returning users.
But that cost doesn’t include the 22 games being streamed exclusively on Prime, Netflix, and Peacock. To watch those games, fans will also have to buy monthly subscriptions, bringing the total cost for new Sunday Ticket subscribers to $737.83 and for returning subs to $920.83, according to All About Cookies.
Packers, Rams lead league in paywalled games
In addition to new subscribers paying less, fans of teams that aren’t very good will also be paying less than the rest of us.
If you are a fan of the Tennessee Titans, New York Jets, Miami Dolphins, Las Vegas Raiders, or Arizona Cardinals, then you have little to worry about, since those teams haven’t been scheduled in any primetime or streaming games this season.
But on the other end of the spectrum, if you are a fan of the Green Bay Packers or Los Angeles Rams, both of which have a league-leading five premium games, be prepared to pay about $889 this year to watch all of their games with a Sunday Ticket + YouTube TV subscription, along with the necessary streaming subscriptions.
Fans of some teams with four premium games, such as the Denver Broncos, Houston Texans, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Jacksonville Jaguars, will pay $852.91. The cost for other teams with four games, including the Chicago Bears, Philadelphia Eagles, and Buffalo Bills, will be $888.87.
Teams with three primetime games, including the Baltimore Ravens, New England Patriots, Dallas Cowboys, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, Seattle Seahawks, New York Giants, and Atlanta Falcons, will also be paying $852.91.
The Cincinnati Bengals are the only team with just three primetime games for which fans will have to pay $888.87, the same as the Packers and Rams, who have two more premium games, according to All About Cookies.
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