The NFL announced it had finally reached a new TV rights package with its network partners on Thursday, with a staggering $10 billion per year coming into the league from its various agreements, per John Ourand.
The NFL will pull in $10 billion per year – a stunning number – from the media deals it that it makes official today. Here's SBJ's story: https://t.co/iBGyPHXa91
— John Ourand (@Ourand_Puck) March 18, 2021
The deal, which is detailed in its entirety here, sees a lot of the same, with Fox and CBS re-upping for NFC and AFC Sunday afternoon games, as well as NBC and ESPN continuing on with Sunday and Monday Night Football, respectively. However, the biggest changes coming in the new package are the various streaming rights allowed now for the partners, who are paying a pretty penny for those. All CBS games will be available to Paramount+ subscribers, ESPN and ABC games (ABC adds two Super Bowls as part of the new deal) will be on ESPN+, NBC games will be on Peacock, and, most notably, the Thursday Night Football slate now moves exclusively to Amazon Prime Video.
The move to having a weekly game only on digital is a major shift for the NFL, which has had Amazon streaming Thursday Night games for some time, but as part of a deal split with NFL Network and Fox to broadcast games on TV. Now, it appears they are fully embracing the digital evolution of streaming, and will move games off of network TV for the first time. NFL Network will still get some games, but it’s unclear exactly which at this point.
The Super Bowl Schedule for the length of the new deal now looks as such:
CBS: 2023, 2027, 2031
FOX: 2024, 2028, 2032
NBC: 2025, 2029, 2033
ESPN/ABC: 2026, 2030
The big winners in the new deal are ESPN, which has for some time paid the most for the worst deal with the NFL. They now are in the Super Bowl rotation and, more importantly, get the flex scheduling deal alongside NBC to pivot bigger, better games into Monday Nights later in the season, which is a huge deal. There were rumblings that some changes could be coming to AT&T/DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket exclusivity, but that was not announced as part of this new deal, indicating that, at least for now, that will remain with the satellite TV giant.
