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By Tom Rogers
Editor-at-Large for Newsweek
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It used to be that support for Israel was the great uniting bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill. That has now been blown up. Replacing it is a subject that is a lot easier to understand, but for some reason key congressional players on both sides of the aisle don't seem to understand it. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md), the ranking Democrat on the committee, could not be more at odds on almost every issue. However, both are pointing fingers at the NFL claiming that the cost of watching football on television, because of games now appearing on streaming services, has gone way up and consumers are being soaked for more money to sit back and watch the national pastime.
What is most remarkable about this attack is that with all the issues on affordability, from gas prices to insurance premiums to health care costs, the one where bipartisan outrage has emerged is a totally phony, nonexistent issue. However, you would never know it from the name of the Judiciary Committee’s report, “The Sports Broadcasting Act: A Special-Interest Antitrust Exemption Gone Awry.” The report purports to delve into the issue as to whether the NFL has violated antitrust laws in the way it sells and markets some of its football games. It is not only Congress that has decided to take on this issue, but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Justice Department also want to be part of tackling it, so to speak.
The fact of the matter is, professional football is more accessible for cheaper cost than the programming of any of the other leagues, and streaming has in fact made it possible for many to access their favorite football programming on a cheaper basis than it used to be.
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Let's start with the fact that every NFL team’s games are available on free broadcast TV in a team's home market for their local audience. The current deals that the NFL has with its broadcast partners—ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC—are in place through 2033, so there will be no near-term change to their availability on that basis for at least several years.
We must remember, however, that even though all teams' games are available over-the-air to the local broadcast audience, for the last several decades most TV viewers were receiving those stations through their cable or satellite subscriptions. What putting these games on streaming services has allowed—ESPN Unlimited, Paramount+, Fox One, Peacock—is the cord cutter to see these games on a much cheaper basis than a cable subscription was priced at.
Most of the games are available on a traditional TV network and simulcast on the streaming service as well. Of course, if one chose to get one's broadcast and cable channels through a streaming service like YouTubeTV, that too is a cheaper way to see your football games—national and local—than it used to be. While there have been a couple of one-off streaming exclusive games in the past, those games now still air on broadcast TV in the team’s home markets. Moreover, even for the Christmas Day doubleheader that will be on Netflix this year, those games will be available over broadcast tv in the local teams’ home markets.
Let’s look at some actual dollar comparisons that Rich Greenfield of Lightshed Partners, a media industry research firm, has put together. While congressional critics say that it now costs over $1,000 to access one's football games in the streaming era, streaming has actually reduced the cost of that access. If one wanted to get the entirety of the games that would have been available on broadcast and cable prior to the streaming era, one could, by getting broadcast network games via antenna, pay a total of $218 for the six-month football season by subscribing to Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, and ESPN Unlimited.
This assumes you either have Prime Video for free through Amazon Prime’s free shipping, as a majority of American households do, or you can watch it for free through Twitch’s Prime Video channel. This also assumes you are just subscribing to the streaming services for the months that those services air NFL games. Alternatively, you could subscribe to a bundle of streaming services over the course of six months that would also include Fox One and the cost would be $387 for the full six months.
There are even more alternative ways to more cheaply access NFL games than a traditional cable subscription would have previously cost, by subscribing to the skinny sports bundles offered by both YouTube TV and DirecTV Stream, along with Amazon, Netflix, and Peacock for the requisite months, at a total of $428. This all compares to a cable package that would not only require a subscription of over $100 a month but also necessitate getting some streaming services for certain national games as well, bringing the total to well over $600. It should be noted that Charter cable, which operates under the Spectrum brand, does actually include the cost of many streaming services when you get their cable channel bundle.
A lot of the congressional ire seems to be aimed at the price of the NFL’s Sunday Ticket, which gives you access to all out-of-market Sunday afternoon games—that is, those not available on local broadcasts or national television. Access to this package, which for many years was only available through DirecTV, required that you have a satellite dish and subscribe to that service. Access to Sunday Ticket is now available through YouTube and can be streamed anywhere without a satellite dish. While the price of that bundle annually is $378, it has never been subscribed to by more than a couple million households—the NFL appetite of the vast majority of households has always been satisfied by all the other televised availability.
As stated above, access to football games has less costly options than the other leagues, but basketball, baseball and hockey often require subscriptions not only to a cable bundle but also payment for a subscription-based regional sports channel on top of that.
What is true is that all this has clearly gotten more confusing for the consumer, not more costly. Finding what game is on what outlet has become more challenging since the number of services that carry games has increased, but we are beginning to see TV user interfaces (UIs) try to solve that by giving you the ability to schedule games by the teams you want to watch—so access to those games are prominently displayed on the UI. Despite how off-base the grandstanding is, it appears that the Judiciary Committee report is intended to lay the groundwork for legislation to be introduced soon to somehow deal with the migration of NFL games to streaming services.
One thing that might come from this is a willingness for the NFL to sell subscriptions to the Sunday Ticket out-of-market games on a basis that doesn’t require a flat price subscription to all such games, but instead—as YoutubeTV has done with its channel package—enable some kind of skinnier bundle.
But the basic truth is NFL games can be accessed more cheaply in the streaming era than was the case in the cable era. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could drive a bipartisan consensus on an issue where bipartisan outrage could really make a difference?
Tom Rogers is executive chairman of the AI film studio Fountain 0, executive chairman of cloud AI grid company Claigrid, Inc., the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC and is currently senior adviser to Versant, the company which owns CNBC and MSNOW. He is also the former CEO of TiVo.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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