Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, made noises last week about cracking down on the NFL. Because of Bad Bunny’s halftime show? Yes, partially. But also due to what he calls the soaring cost of streaming NFL games.
According to the New York Post, Lee has written a letter calling on the FTC and Justice Department to “probe whether the law governing rights to air games serves consumers in the age of streaming.”
To briefly go into how NFL broadcasts work: The majority of games, on Sunday afternoons, are on either CBS or Fox, which are broadcast networks, while Sunday night games are on a different broadcast network, NBC. Monday night games are on ESPN, although some are simulcast on ABC, while Thursday night games are exclusive to streaming, on the streaming service Prime Video.
Certain games, such as Sunday morning games played overseas, and occasional one-shot games are sometimes streamed exclusively on services like Peacock or Netflix.
Lee, in his letter to the government officials, says the following:
“I applaud President Trump and his Administration for addressing affordability for American consumers. To watch every NFL game during this past season, football fans spent almost $1,000 on cable and streaming subscriptions. In practice, this requires subscribing to multiple streaming services and maintaining high-speed internet in addition to a traditional cable or satellite bundle. The resulting fragmentation has produced consumer confusion and increasing costs for viewers attempting to watch their teams.”
Lee is wrong, though, for a simple reason: It’s not really possible, nor practical, for NFL fans to “watch every NFL game.” The majority of fans watch all of the games of the team they root for, and if they live in the same city, those games are simulcast on free TV ― even the ones on Amazon and ESPN.
The closest approximation to “watching every game” is the package known as Sunday Ticket, which was formerly exclusive to DirecTV and for the last few years has been exclusive to YouTube TV. This is a way for fans who live somewhere other than their home market to watch all of their favorite team’s games. Yes, Sunday Ticket is expensive – usually between $300 and $400 per season — but it was expensive in the pre-streaming era as well.
To get to the dollar amount of watching NFL games costs over $1,000, one must take into account subscribing to Sunday Ticket, as well as every streaming service that has any NFL games, and staying subscribed for the entire season. This is simply not the way most football fans watch football.
For one thing, a large percentage of fans are willing to only watch their own home team’s games, which is free with an antenna, and also available with even the most bare-bones cable subscription. Perhaps they subscribe to Amazon to watch all of the Thursday night games, which is the cost of an Amazon Prime subscription (which has plenty of benefits beyond just football).
There’s also the popular pastime of free trials and strategically cancelling and resubscribing. If you’re an NFL fan who’s not a Netflix subscriber, you can sign up for the service for the one day of the year the NFL games are on that service — Christmas Day — and then cancel.
There’s another popular workaround, especially for fans of out-of-market teams: Going to bars and restaurants that have the Sunday Ticket package to watch the games there, which was my primary way of watching football in my 20s.
When it comes to fans, especially less tech-savvy ones, being confused about how to watch particular games, I take Lee’s point. And he has more of a point when it comes other sports, especially the NBA and MLB.
But when it comes to football, fans have it pretty good; and hardly any of them are paying $1000 a year for the privilege of watching games.
