If you want advice on long-term relationships, I suggest the following: Find someone who loves you like the news media loves your holiday content.
The New Yorker wrote an article 11 years ago about why our brains love lists, and it still holds up today. One of the other reasons is: It organizes information spatially and promises a finite story.
Of course, the NFL story will continue beyond 2025. But in the space below, we provide eight NFL media stories that have captured our attention in 2024.
1. Tom Brady begins his NFL broadcasting journey.
Fox owns the broadcast rights to this year’s Super Bowl, meaning Brady will be calling the most important game in the league in his rookie season as a TV analyst. He signed a 10-year, $375 million, 15-game deal with Fox. This journey has prompted many comments about his achievements, including several of this author’s works.
Brady’s broadcast work improved during the season. It may not be enough to make you an elite TV analyst, but the progress is noticeable. Still, the long-term prediction here is that Brady’s juggling role as Las Vegas Raiders owner and TV analyst, and the restrictions that come with it, feels unsustainable for Fox and Brady.
Tom Brady has improved as a game broadcaster, but February’s Super Bowl will be the final test of his progress. (Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
2. Netflix launches NFL game package
Netflix and the NFL announced a three-season deal for Christmas games through 2026 in May. The deal expands further in that Netflix has secured exclusive U.S. broadcast rights to the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cup. This is an important signal to the market that Netflix has transitioned from an interest in sports-related properties to a legitimate sports rights holder (with the WWE rights deal taking into account the live element).
The streaming giant broadcast the Kansas City Chiefs-Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens-Houston Texans games on Christmas Day and did a great job of avoiding glitch-filled reruns of the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight event.
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3. Peacock broadcasts regular season games in Sao Paulo.
The Philadelphia Eagles-Green Bay Packers game on September 6 was the NFL’s first regular season game played in South America and aired exclusively on Peacock, the streaming network’s third exclusive NFL game following the Buffalo Bills-Los Angeles Chargers regular season game. It is done. Miami Dolphins-Chiefs AFC wild card playoff game in December 2023 and last January.
As a result, viewership for the league and streamers improved significantly. Peacock delivered 14.2 million viewers for Eagles-Packers, well above Bills-Chargers’ 7.3 million, and Peacock’s second-largest NFL streaming audience behind the Chiefs-Dolphins game (23 million). There are many. The numbers include figures from the over-the-air markets in which the game was played.
The NFL plans to host eight international games in 2025, including one in Madrid, making Spain the sixth country to host NFL regular season games. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt have talked publicly about playing 16 games overseas each year in the short term, according to a report from SBJ’s Ben Fischer. It is clear that a new international media rights package will soon be revealed on Sunday morning.
4. Super Bowl LVIII breaks TV viewership records
With new outdoor viewership data and factors like cord cutters and cord nevers, we live in an apples to pomegranate world when comparing sports viewership today and in the past. Using today’s metrics via Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, the Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime win over the San Francisco 49ers in February’s Super Bowl averaged 123.7 million viewers across TV and streaming platforms. This made it the most-watched program in history, breaking the previous record of 115.1 million viewers set during Kansas City’s last-minute win over Philadelphia in the previous Super Bowl.
Fans watch Super Bowl LVIII outside the Chase Center in San Francisco. The game was the highest-rated show in television history. (Lauren Elliott/Getty Images)
5. The emergence of alternative broadcasting
Replacement broadcasts of NFL games have entered a new stratosphere with the “Simpsons” animated replacement for “Monday Night Football” airing on ESPN+ and Disney+ in 2024, and NBC Sports debuted its NFL alternative broadcast on Peacock last week with the Texans. I did it. Chiefs game. It follows Nickelodeon and ESPN’s now long-running replacement for the Manning Brothers broadcast and broadcast featuring “Toy Story.”
6. The ‘New Heights’ podcast is gaining popularity.
The popular podcast hosted by brothers Jason Kelce, Eagles’ center from 2011 to 2023, and Travis Kelce, now Chiefs’ tight end, has signed a deal with Amazon’s podcast network Wondery to become the show’s new home in 2024. .
The show is on the measured list of America’s largest podcasts and has nearly 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube. One interesting aspect of the deal is Wondery’s plan to translate the podcast into other languages to grow its global audience, including in NFL strong markets like the United Kingdom and Mexico. For NFL fans, it’s a void.
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The Kelce brothers and their popular podcast ‘Heights’
7. New broadcasting rules to improve accessibility
It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen more in-game interviews during NFL games this season. Last May, the NFL Broadcasting Department outlined changes to access for NFL TV partners following a review between the league and media rights holders. Common goal? Enhance game content viewed by NFL viewers. The new rules included in-game coach interviews for all games, pregame player interviews for all games, network pregame locker room coverage, preseason player interviews, and network cameras in the coach booth. Look for it to continue.
8. The NFL was ordered to pay $4.7 billion in the ‘Sunday Ticket’ antitrust trial, but the trial was overturned.
Last August, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles overturned a $4.7 billion judgment against the NFL for conspiring to raise the price of its “NFL Sunday Ticket” television package. The judge rejected expert testimony that the jury used to determine damages. (The jury’s decision threatened to upend the league’s strategy of selling exclusive TV packages to broadcasters.) Next up is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Per Sportico legal writer and sports law professor Michael McMann, a decision is likely to take months.
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(Top photo of Netflix “Christmas Game Day” banner from Wednesday’s Chiefs-Steelers game: Mark Alberti / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
