The National Football League’s (NFL) early partnership with Netflix appears to have gone off without a hitch on Christmas Day, according to preliminary, yet limited, information released by the organization.
Shortly after the conclusion of the first of two NFL games on Christmas which saw the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Kansas City Chiefs, officials with the NFL’s media office said the game was the second most-popular live event on Netflix in the streaming company’s history.
Nearly one-third of Netflix’s global subscribers were watching the game, the NFL said. Netflix said it had more than 282.7 million global streaming subscribers as of the end of the third quarter (Q3). Assuming that number continued to hold through the middle of Q4, the NFL would have grabbed just north of 90 million streaming subscribers who tuned in to watch some of the game on Wednesday. Actual viewership numbers were not available as of press time.
The NFL said Netflix “has eclipsed peak concurrent viewers of any Christmas in the past four years” with its first of two football games.
Netflix spent $150 million on the two games, and has the rights to Christmas Day games broadcast over the next two years. The service has quickly built up its arsenal of appointment-viewing live events as a way to grow its global subscriber base and retain customers who binge-watch the company’s original series like “Ozark” and “Squid Games” in a single sitting.
The company’s strategy in pursuing live sports rights to make its service a destination for TV and sports fans alike is not dissimilar from how broadcast and cable networks have made their brands households names over the decades. But the amount of money that Netflix has been willing to commit to grab events like the two Christmas Day NFL games, a highly-anticipated boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, golf tournaments involving pro sports athletes and worldwide wrestling rights has been aggressive.
Part of its pursuit for live events is meant to appease advertisers as Netflix continues to build out and grow its ad-supported business; doing so helps the company lean away from its reliance on subscriber fees as its main source of income.
“They’ve got more demand than they can handle, or were expecting, and that’s leading to a rush to develop as many content deals as they can,” Juice Media‘s Chief Strategy Officer Stanlei Bellan said in an interview earlier this year.
Netflix might be spending big to get just two games this year, but Bellan said those games will super-serve the streamer’s advertising clients, who want more live events that can reach a sizable audience across platforms and at the same time.
“With these games, everyone will be watching the same thing at the same time,” Bellan affirmed, noting that “the Christmas Day games are a nice touch, because it associates the NFL and Netflix with a specific date.”
