Nearly 65 million households tuned in to watch some or all of two Christmas Day football games streamed live on Netflix this season, according to preliminary ratings data released by the National Football League.
The data, which comes from Nielsen, showed the second of the two games that saw the Baltimore Ravens taken on the Houston Texans had the highest average minute audience with 24.3 million viewers, compared to 24.1 million viewers who tuned in to watch some or all of the early window game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The games were hardly competitive, with the visiting teams — the Chiefs and the Ravens — easily winning their games on Christmas. But the novelty of having two football games streamed on Netflix, a first for the service, was enough to draw a significant amount of interest to the world’s biggest streaming service by subscriber count.
Hans Schroeder, the Executive Vice President of Media Distribution at the NFL, said Netflix subscribers “in all 50 states and over 200 countries around the world” watched at least some of either or both games on Christmas Day. Neither the NFL nor Netflix released concrete viewership figures for the United States or other countries, aside from the preliminary ratings data sourced to Nielsen. The Nielsen data included local TV simulcasts on over-the-air CBS-owned or affiliated stations in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Houston.
Netflix spent around $150 million to offer the two globally-televised NFL games on Christmas Day. The streamer also has national TV rights to Christmas Day football games in the 2025 and 2026 seasons. The two games streamed on Wednesday were archived by NFL Plus later in the day and were rebroadcast on NFL Network between Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.
