Fans watching Chiefs-Dolphins on Peacock will notice a change: Fewer commercials
The NFL’s decision to put the Chiefs-Dolphins Wild Card game on Peacock was met with emotions ranging from surprise to anger.
But a Front Office Sports-Harris Poll this week found a majority of football fans are willing to pay to watch an NFL playoff game.
This is from the Front Office story about the poll: “About three in five (61%) NFL fans and two in five (45%) U.S. adults said they would be likely to pay for a subscription to a streaming service to watch an NFL playoff game, according to the survey. If the NFL were to take things a step further and make a postseason matchup a pay-per-view event, 57% of NFL fans and 42% of U.S. adults surveyed say they would be likely to pay a one-time fee to watch an NFL playoff game. Of those NFL fans willing to pay a per-game price, more than half (53%) would pay $10+, and 17% would pay $20+.”
The NFL has embraced streaming, having moved its “Thursday Night Football” games to Amazon Prime last year. And Peacock is paying a reported $110 million to the NFL for the right to stream Saturday’s playoff game.
Hans Schroeder, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of NFL Media, explained why the league agreed to make the Chiefs-Dolphins contest a streaming-only option for fans outside of home markets.
“We know and we see the continued evolution in the media landscape, and we want to be where our fans are,” Schroeder said Wednesday in an NBC Sports conference call. “We know they’re increasingly, especially younger fans, on different screens. 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, and why our distribution is on somewhere like NFL+ ... along with Peacock.
“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.”
While Peacock only paid for this year’s playoff game, Schroeder said he expects fans could see this happen again next season.
Commercial free quarter
This won’t be Peacock’s first foray into a streaming-only game. The Chargers-Bills game on Dec. 23 was only available to people with Peacock (as well as the local markets).
In that game, Peacock didn’t have any commercials in the fourth quarter.
“We’re doing that again,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said in the conference call. “We learned Dec. 23 the ins and outs from that commercial-free fourth quarter, whether to go back to studio more or stay on the field. We’re finalizing plans, but there will be updates to that moving forward.
“It was a great learning experience on Dec. 23, and that setup of having NBC at 4:30 leading into a Peacock game is something that ... really did work for us. We’re going to see that happen again this Saturday.”
NBC Sports said viewers in Kansas City, who will be able to watch the game on KSHB (Ch. 41), and in Miami (on Ch. 6) also won’t see any commercials in the fourth quarter of the Wild Card game.
