There’s a strange comfort that comes with knowing where to find the National Football League on Sunday afternoons. For decades, NBC was the longtime home of the AFC. Then in 1995, things changed and CBS took over the AFC broadcasts while Fox continued carrying the NFC.
Things are a bit more decentralized these days, as NBC’s return to broadcasting the NFL in the form of Sunday Night Football in 2006 changed the way the league assigns games, something that continued to change in the years that followed. And one of the biggest developments of that deal was that ABC no longer broadcasted NFL football — NBC took over Sunday Nights, ESPN took Monday Night Football from ABC and the latter focused on network programming instead.
ABC and ESPN are all owned by Disney, anyway, so it’s not like the parent company was out of the NFL ecosystem, qnd if reports are true, they’re willing to get the network broadcast channel back in the game in a big way. According to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, ABC apparently wants to bid for a Sunday afternoon broadcast package.
That would spell some competition for either CBS or Fox, perhaps both if ABC wants to get frisky.
Sources have told The Post that ABC is kicking around the idea of going hard after CBS’ or Fox’s NFL Sunday packages. Besides the games on Sundays, it also would allow ABC to pick up a Super Bowl or two.
This is somewhat speculation at this point, informed by sources familiar with Disney’s discussions. ESPN and ABC — both owned by Disney — declined comment.
As Marchand points out, this whole bidding process may not take place for some time — the current packages paid for by CBS and Fox run until 2022. But what’s perhaps most interesting about all this is that it flies in the face of a lot of recent news about the NFL, namely that ratings are sagging and people have been turned off from the sport by the social justice initiatives its athletes have shined a spotlight on.
One of the biggest variables for all of this package would be what happens to streaming rights for the games themselves. DirecTV has its own package for the whole shebang, and as cord-cutters may know well by now, it’s a lot easier to, say, find a cable login and stream games on Fox than it is to watch anything on CBS without a significantly greater commitment. An alternative digital partner could actually be a player in the bidding to come.
The Amazons, Twitters, Facebooks and Yahoos could very well continue to do side deals — such as Amazon acquiring the digital rights to Thursday night — though it is unclear if that has had much, if any, impact. Their motivation to do these megadeals is not yet certain, though Netflix, for example, would be an unlikely player as it has a no-ad-based product and its model is not based on live programming.
The upstart DAZN, which is boxing-centric for now in the US, has loads of cash and a record with its international deals. Another traditional player, Turner, could be a bigger wild card for the main rights, like Monday night, depending how its incoming ownership, AT&T, views spending more on football.
The fact of the matter is that, boycotts or ratings slipping or not, there’s still a good number of networks and media entities willing to pay a lot of money to broadcast live NFL games. By the sound of it, some are even willing to spark a bidding war to get them.
