The NFL Continues to Find Ways To Complicate Watching Football, And Now The Government Is Getting Involved. Remember Just Going To The Bar To Watch The Game?
Yahoo Sports- FCC Brendan Carr on Tuesday suggested the probe into the NFL's broadcasting deals stems from the league putting a significant portion of games on streaming services.
Last week, the Department of Justice opened a probe into the NFL to take a closer look at the way the league does business with broadcasters. As part of the league's current media right deal, it has the right to opt out and renegotiate after the 2029 season. The expectation is that the NFL will opt out and ask for even more than the $10 billion it receives annually from broadcasters.
Over the last few years, the NFL has given streaming networks — like Peacock and Netflix — exclusive access to a handful of games each season. Amazon Prime is also the home of Thursday Night Football. Said Carr, "I do think there's a point at which the NFL reaches a tipping point where they're sticking too many games behind a paywall, in which case it really raises a lot of questions about the scope of that."
Maybe I'm just getting old, (yah, I'm definitely getting old), but I swear watching football used to be the easiest thing in the world. Sunday came around, you turned on CBS or FOX and watched football all day. Then you watched Sunday Night Football. Monday night was ABC (and then ESPN). It was a pretty simple system and you didn't have to check Twitter to figure out where a game was being broadcast. And you didn't have to remember which email address you used to sign up for an app six months ago. And you most definitely didn't need your parents' Netflix password, your girlfriend's Amazon login and a YouTube subscription just to make it through an NFL season.
Somehow that is where we've ended up though, and I started thinking about this again after NFL+ had all kinds of problems on opening Sunday. Not sure if you heard, but people couldn't get streams to load, Redzone wasn't working for some subscribers, there were frozen screens and black screens, and the NFL eventually acknowledged there were issues and apologized. Yes technology screws up, Im not going to kill them because an app went down, because every app goes down. But it was a big enough deal that DC and the White House have decided to get involved.
And for good reason, because there was something pretty funny about the NFL's own streaming service crapping out on the exact day everybody had been waiting months to use it, because it perfectly summed up how unnecessarily complicated we've made watching sports. Wasn't streaming supposed to solve all of this? That was the entire sales pitch when everybody started cutting the cord. Why are you paying for 200 cable channels when you only watch 12 of them right? Get rid of cable pick what you want, and only pay for what you watch. Everything will be cheaper and easier. Sounded great to me and everybody else.
Except then every company on Earth started its own streaming service, everybody bought exclusive rights to different things, and 10 years later we've basically rebuilt the cable bundle except now the channels are separate apps with separate monthly bills.
For the NFL alone you've got Amazon for Thursday Night Football. Netflix has Christmas games, YouTube has Sunday Ticket for consumers, ESPN has Monday Night Football, Peacock has had exclusive games, NFL Network has games, NFL+ now has games and of course the RedZone options. Then obviously you still have CBS, FOX, NBC and ABC involved. I follow this stuff for a living and even I have nights where somebody mentions a game and my first thought is, "Wait, what is that on?" God forbid you're my dad trying to figure this out. And it would be one thing if all this fragmentation made everything dramatically cheaper, but that hasn't exactly happened either, because estimates cited by the FCC earlier this year put the cost of having access to every NFL game at more than $1,000 over the course of a season, spread across as many as 10 services.
According to Toast, the median price of a beer at a bar in the United States is $6.52. Now bear with me because this is extremely dumb math. Let's say your team has a great year and goes all the way to the Super Bowl. You're watching them play somewhere around 20 or 21 games between the regular season and playoffs. Take that $1,000 you're potentially spending to have access to every NFL game and divide it over 20 games. That's $50 a game. At $6.52 a beer, that's more than seven beers. I am obviously not suggesting you go drink seven beers every Sunday for five months (please do not send me an email in February blaming me for your divorce).
But rather, the point is, when you actually put the numbers next to each other, it's pretty hilarious. Because we've reached a point where instead of paying for every possible streaming service and watching from your couch, you could take that money, go to the bar every Sunday, have a couple beers, order wings or a burger, tip your bartender, watch whatever game you want and still probably come out pretty well. And honestly, the more I thought about that, the more I realized maybe that's the answer to this entire stupid problem.
Just go to the bar.
Remember that crazy concept?
I'm biased here because I've been in the bar and hospitality business for a long time, but watching a big game at a good sports bar is still one of the best ways to watch sports, and it always has been. There are definitely Sundays where the last thing I want to do is leave my couch. I'm not pretending I want to be shoulder-to-shoulder with 200 people for Jaguars-Titans at 1 p.m. Sometimes sitting at home in sweatpants watching Redzone is exactly what God intended, but for YOUR team? A playoff game, or a huge college football game? March Madness? The World Cup? There's no comparison.
Half the fun is being around everybody else.
You walk into a packed bar where everybody is watching the same game and within ten minutes you're talking to people you've never met before like you've known them for years. And when something huge happens, good or bad, everybody experiences it together. That is what sports is all about.
It's the same reason we'll pay an absurd amount of money to sit 25 rows up at a stadium when technically the view of the game is 10 times better on our 75-inch television at home. You're not going because the camera angle is better, you're going because being around thousands of other people who care about the same stupid thing you care about is the entire point.
The restaurant and bar industry obviously got absolutely demolished during COVID, and a ton of places never made it back. The ones that did have spent the last several years dealing with higher food and labor costs, rent, insurance and everything else that has gotten more expensive. So if you're already going to spend money to watch football, there's something kind of nice about that money going to the neighborhood place down the street. Have a couple beers, get some food, get out of the house, tip somebody, help keep a local place busy on a Sunday, and get out and meet and interact with people.
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And the best part is you don't have to know where the game is, because pretty much every bar in America that considers itself a "sports bar" carries the NFL Sunday Ticket. You walk in and say, "Do you guys have the Patriots game on?" and that's it. You don't care whether it's coming through a satellite 22,000 miles above Earth or Jeff Bezos personally carrying the signal into the building, you just want the Patriots game on the television in front of you. Which is where DIRECTV actually deserves some credit in all of this. While the consumer side of sports television can seem like this giant puzzle of apps and subscriptions, DIRECTV is actually working to put the pieces together, and that’s critically important for bars and restaurants. DIRECTV FOR BUSINESS distributes NFL Sunday Ticket and all of the other sports people want to watch to commercial establishments, and the whole idea is pretty simple- if you call yourself a sports bar, people should be able to walk in and watch sports.
Not exactly splitting the atom here, but somehow we've made television complicated enough that "the game is on" has become a legitimate selling point again. I also didn't realize until recently that there's a Sports Bar Finder that DIRECTV FOR BUSINESS has created (absolutely genius) where you can actually search for bars showing the games you're looking for, so if you're traveling or your local place doesn't have what you want, you can check before you go instead of walking into six different places asking if they have the game. Which is pretty funny when you think about how completely backwards we've gone in terms of things going from internet 1.0 and Mapquest, to GPS for everything, to now back to something as basic as this. Technology was supposed to make watching sports at home so easy that nobody would ever need to leave the house again, but instead we've now created technology to help us find a bar so we can go there and have somebody else deal with all the technology. Maybe just maybe we outsmarted ourselves a little bit?
Streaming is whatever at this point. Sure, I guess the more ways to watch sports is great. But having to pay for more ways to watch sports is where we lost the plot. Because those are two completely different things. If you're somebody who already has every streaming service known to man and loves sitting at home with four televisions going at once every Sunday, like Stu Feiner, God bless you. I respect the setup. But if you're looking at Amazon, Netflix, Peacock, ESPN, YouTube, NFL+, NFL Sunday Ticket and wondering when watching football became another monthly bill you needed an excel sheet to keep track of, there is a much easier solution.
Go down the street, find a bar with the game, order some food and a beer, talk to somebody you don't know, tip your bartender, and WATCH FOOTBALL.
It's funny, we spent the last decade inventing a million new ways to watch sports, and somehow one of the best options is still the exact same one our dads had- go to the bar and ask them to put the game on.
Boom done.