The start of the National Football League’s (NFL) regular season coincides with an uptick in sign-ups for streaming cable-like television services, according to a new report published by Ampere Analysis this week.
The report says interest in NFL games aired on broadcast TV stations and the Walt Disney Company’s ESPN, among other places, is responsible for a 77 percent boost in sign-ups for virtual multi-video programming distributors, or vMVPDs, the industry term given to streaming services that offer many of the same channels as traditional pay TV platforms like cable and satellite.
While traditional pay TV has experienced a significant decline in subscriber counts over the years, sports fans still seem to prefer an all-in-one platform that offers the channels carrying their favorite events and teams — and are willing to pay near cable-like prices to get it.
The NFL is the most-popular live television event from September to February — the period that coincides with the start of the NFL’s regular season through the championship Super Bowl game. While some international and playoff games have been relegated to streaming-only platforms like NFL Plus and Prime Video (and, this year, two Christmas Day games will be on Netflix), the majority of games are still on three broadcast networks — CBS, Fox and NBC — and cable network ESPN, which occasionally simulcasts games on ABC.
Streaming services like YouTube TV, Fubo, Hulu with Live TV and DirecTV Stream typically offer these channels as part of their base programming package, which starts at $73 per month for YouTube TV and goes up from there. While these prices are comparable to some cable and satellite packages, streaming services offer flexibility that cable and satellite sometimes does not, including the ability to watch across different devices like phones, tablets and computers, and save content in an unlimited cloud DVR for later playback.
“For vMPVDs, and many other platforms carrying NFL games, the sign-up rate is consistently high throughout the season,” Ampere said in its note on Monday. “The biggest sign-up drivers are the start of the season, for those who want to watch it in its entirety, and the Super Bowl, for those who want to see the competition’s biggest game.”
“As the most popular sporting event in the US, the NFL can be a powerful subscription driver for companies acquiring broadcast rights,” Ben McMurray, a research manager at Ampere Analysis, said on Monday. “It also has the power to drive significant viewership on free-to-air channels and inflate the overall TV market during the NFL season, and deflate it when the season ends.”
The largest sign-up for a Super Bowl game was last year’s telecast on Fox, which saw 410,000 new subscriptions start in a single day. Unlike CBS and NBC, which offer NFL games on their direct-to-consumer streaming services, Fox does not make NFL games available through a similar product. Instead, Fox requires football fans to use an antenna to watch games, or sign up for a pay TV package — which might be why the network’s presentation of the Super Bowl last year eclipsed CBS’s coverage of the same event this year in terms of vMVPD conversions.
That might change soon. Fox is current one of three participants in a new joint venture called Venu Sports, which aims to bring its broadcast and cable sports channels to consumers directly via streaming. Disney and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) are also participating in the venture, which is expected to cost around $50 per month for access to sports-inclusive networks like ABC, Fox, TBS, TNT and ESPN, among others.
Venu Sports is currently on pause while a federal court weighs an antitrust claim brought by Fubo, which offers channels from Fox and Disney. But Ampere believes offering live sports directly to consumers is the way things are headed — and, if that is the case, it could severely restrict growth opportunities for vMVPD services moving forward.
“The biggest potential threat to vMPVD services in the future is the sale of games and packages as exclusives to streaming services,” McMurray said. “vMPVDs can thrive even without direct investment in the NFL, acting in a mutually beneficial way with broadcasters by extending the advertising reach of games. However, if the shift to streaming exclusives continues, vMPVD services will have to either invest directly in rights or provide access to streaming services as an aggregator to continue attracting subscribers.”
