LOS ANGELES — Netflix is no longer simply in the “sports-adjacent” business. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced a three-season deal with the National Football League that will include showing two Christmas Day games on its service this year. It’s the first time Netflix has become partners with a major sports league, and it likely won’t be the last.
The move follows Netflix’s increasingly aggressive push into the business of live events. In the past two weeks, “The Roast of Tom Brady” was its most-watched English-language TV show; a quirky six-day John Mulaney talk show went viral as part of the Netflix Is a Joke live comedy festival; and the stand-up special “Katt Williams: Woke Foke” was viewed 4.3 million times.
“Last year, we decided to take a big bet on live — tapping into massive fandoms across comedy, reality TV, sports and more,” Bela Bejaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said. “There are no live annual events, sports or otherwise, that compare with the audiences NFL football attracts.”
At a time when more people are dropping their traditional cable subscriptions, live sports remain catnip for advertisers because they are one place where audiences are guaranteed in real time.
Last month, Netflix announced that its lower-priced subscription service, which features ads, grew 65% in the first quarter of the year, and said Wednesday that it now had 40 million global monthly active users on that plan.
“This shows just how serious Netflix is taking advertising, because you don’t do this unless you are fully committed, all in, on how big you think this is going to be,” said Richard Greenfield, media and technology analyst at Lightshed Partners.
Netflix has also committed to so-called sports-adjacent live programming. In January, it reached a multibillion-dollar, 10-year deal for World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship weekly wrestling show, “Raw.” And in March it announced that it would stream a boxing match between Mike Tyson and social media influencer Jake Paul live in July.
While the NFL deal is a first for Netflix, it is a continuance of the league’s streaming strategy.
Amazon began streaming Thursday night games exclusively on its Prime service in 2022. In January, NBCUniversal showed an NFL playoff game on Peacock, the first time in the league’s history that it granted a streaming service exclusive rights to a playoff game.
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