Like the announcerless game of 1980 between the Jets and the Dolphins, Sunday’s game between the Bills and Jaguars, broadcast by CBS in Jacksonville and Buffalo and by Yahoo everywhere else was the first of its kind. Unlike the announcerless game, the TV-less NFL game likely won’t be a one-time thing.
Look for the NFL to offer at least one of the annual international games through a streaming-only service (with over-the-air TV in the local markets) for each of the remaining years of the existing TV rights deals, all of which run through 2022.
It won’t necessarily happen on Yahoo, which inked a one-year-only deal with the NFL for the Bills-Jaguars game. By next year, the game could land on Google/YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, or another comparable (and possibly not even currently in existence) company.
Per a league source, Google/YouTube made a serious play for the DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket package within the past few years, but the NFL was not yet sufficiently confident about the technology and/or the ability of fans to take full advantage of the opportunity to translate an Internet stream to a 70-inch flatscreen that shows nine games at once. By 2023, the NFL could feel much more comfortable with selling NFL Sunday Ticket or something more substantial to an Internet company.
Consider the Monday Night Football package. With ESPN facing significant financial problems due to millions people who previously were forking over $5 or more per month for channels they never watched no longer using cable or satellite at all, ESPN may not be able to afford $2 billion or more per year as of 2023. Yahoo or Google or a similar company may be able to do it -- and may crave for the chance to do it.
Think about Amazon, with its existing trove of information about user preferences and purchases. Ads could be targeted to specific demographics (making those ads much more valuable and effective), and Amazon can add a button allowing the user to immediately purchase whatever happens to be displayed on the screen.
It’s also possible, in theory, for the NFL to cut out the middlemen and sell games directly to fans, with geotargeting ensuring that games from the home team would be available for free, and with all (or most) other games purchased from the NFL.
Regardless of how it all plays out, look for the way we watch football games to potentially change dramatically as of 2023. And the revolution will be traced back to Sunday morning’s game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars.