ASKING FOOTBALL AMERICA TO PAY $5.99 FOR A CLASSIC GAME — IT’S WRONG
A January playoff season, when networks draw their biggest ratings annually, shouldn’t have viewers pay added sums to watch the Chiefs and Dolphins amid -25 wind chills — too frigid for Taylor?
As it is, you’re paying $238 monthly for traditional broadcast consumption. The package would include Fox, NBC, CBS and Disney channels, the forerunners of NFL wild-card weekend — all financed. But on Saturday night, when one of the coldest football games in American history sends frostbite through sound speakers, guess what happens when you reach for the remote.
Guess what happens when you want Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce — is it too frigid for Taylor to show? — and Tyreek Hill on your airwaves. A streaming service called Peacock wants you to spend an additional $5.99 to watch the Kansas City Chiefs host the Miami Dolphins. Never mind the $238 and whatever else you spend on sports viewing. NBC’s streaming service will ask you to bend over and spend more, with hopes you buy in forever and watch “Ted,” an industry bring-back of Seth MacFarlane’s mash with foul-mouthed teddy bears.
How about if the NFL, with its $120 billion in media money on the rise, allowed Peacock to stream only in the regular season? How about if the league, aware of its most compelling playoff games, doesn’t upset fans of the defending Super Bowl champions, the “Hard Knocks” trials of the Dolphins and uber-abundant darlings of Taylor Swift? Along with expected lows of -8 degrees at Arrowhead Stadium, as wind chills push temperatures below -25, this will be the highlight of the opening weekend in a month of America’s prime-time viewing bethrothal.
Why not try a weak one, Philadelphia at Tampa Bay? And why make us pay the fool’s sums to NBCUniversal, which must be loving these circumstances? Who among us, even those dead-set against Peacock, won’t wonder if the 7-10 p.m. atmosphere might approach the Ice Bowl in Green Bay, the league’s 1967 title game, with -13 temperatures and -48 wind chills? All so the NFL could take an additional $110 million from a streamer that lost $3 billion last year.
It’s not the $5.99 that bothers us. It’s the extreme greed that drives the owners and commissioner Roger Goodell. All of us know streaming is blowing out cable, destined to take over our home entertainment whims by decade’s end. The NFL’s path is critical in controlling those massive changes. We know the league wants Peacock and Amazon to thrive and, of course, enter future media negotiations.
“Certainly with this kind of investment, we would like to have a lot of people sign up and sample us,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBCUniversal group. “And then we’d like to get them to use the product a lot, and for a long time.”
But the NFL postseason doesn’t deserve any trial run. The league is expecting gamblers to expand their app usage — and now they must pay more money just to see a big game. Said Hans Schroeder, the league’s executive vice president of media distribution: “Every one of our games is on broadcast television, at least in their market, and probably 90 percent of our games is on broadcast as their core platform. But for us, it remains really important, while we continue to remain very strong there and have great partnerships with the broadcast partners that we do, to increase our presence across digital.”
Meaning, cash in and promote the future. “We know and we see the continued evolution in the media landscape, and we want to be where our fans are. We know they’re increasingly, especially younger fans, on different screens,” Schroeder said. “So that’s why it’s important for us, not just for this wild card game, but throughout the year, that we’re on Peacock and Paramount+ and Amazon and these different digital platforms. Again, we’re very focused and very committed on broadcast. For us, it’s not either/or, it’s both. We want to continue to broaden the distribution for our content. That’s the way we think we engage the broadest possible fans, and that’s what the driving strategy is for the majority of our content.”
None of us should oppose new programming attempts. But to demand new January football money with the likes of, what — “Ted,” “The Traitors” with Alan Cumming, “Vanderpump Rules” and “The Office” from past reels — doesn’t excite the masses. All I know? Chiefs-Dolphins cannot afford historic moments in the freeze of Missouri.
Or millions of people will miss them.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.