NFL’s Streaming Future Could Be Set by End of 2025

This year marks a turning point for the NFL’s streaming future — and not just because of Tubi.

To be sure, the free streaming service delivered what its owner Fox said was the biggest streaming audience for a Super Bowl to date, with 15.5 million “peak concurrent streaming viewers” and an average per-minute audience of 13.6 million — more than the linear viewership for several regular-season primetime games.

The Tubi simulcast also set an important precedent, as the NFL and its network partners will likely want to continue leveraging the cord-cutting audience — and attendant ad revenue — a free streamer can deliver. (I’d expect some soul searching over at Paramount ahead of CBS’ next Super Bowl broadcast about whether to provide a simulcast on its FAST service Pluto TV.)

But the bigger story lies in the NFL’s evolving relationship with subscription streaming, starting with the fact that, beginning this year, no league content will be exclusively available on linear TV anymore.

This fact solidified only within the last few weeks, with Fox’s announcement that it will launch a new standalone subscription streaming service by the end of 2025. With ESPN’s forthcoming SVOD platform, known as “Flagship,” also expected to launch later this year (and almost certainly targeting this fall’s NFL season as a deadline to make it to market), all of the NFL’s distribution partners will now — for the first time ever — offer their coverage outside of traditional TV, to viewers without a pay TV subscription.

This does not mean Fox is making every NFL game available to stream nationwide, of course. While CBS’ Sunday afternoon games have streamed via Paramount+ for years now, they are only available to streaming viewers in the teams’ local markets, just as on linear TV. Fox’s SVOD will presumably follow the same model, so as not to compete with the league’s Sunday Ticket subscription offering.

But this development is nonetheless a major milestone in the history of televised sports and in the ongoing decline of the traditional pay TV ecosystem. The NFL has long been seen as linear’s most effective bulwark against the cord-cutting exodus, with the league providing 45 of the 100 most-watched primetime telecasts in 2024 (and 72 of the top 100 overall). Two of the top 10 were playoff games aired on Fox and therefore unable to be streamed without a pay TV subscription.

The arrival of Fox’s SVOD and ESPN Flagship will upend this dynamic, potentially accelerating cord-cutting significantly, even as their parents’ CEOs insist the services are intended to reach consumers already outside the cable bundle.

If this does prove to be the case, it will be a win-win for all involved, with the NFL growing its audience and the beleaguered legacy media companies gaining purely incremental subscription and ad revenue. But the more likely reality is that the new streamers will continue to cannibalize linear TV subscribers and revenues and prompt the league to consider expanding its streaming presence as quickly as possible.

Indeed, 2029 is already looming like a pitch-black storm cloud for legacy media, for that is the year the NFL can opt out of current contracts with all TV partners except Disney.

Current linear ratings may suggest the league won’t do so, but four years is plenty of time for viewership to shift decisively toward streaming, and the past four years have certainly proven the media landscape can be reshaped practically overnight.

Furthermore, the NFL has shown an almost chops-licking eagerness to strike new deals with streamers, handing off an annual Black Friday game to Amazon ($100 million), a 2023-24 season playoff game to Peacock ($110 million), followed by a 2024-25 season playoff game also to Amazon ($120 million), two Christmas Day games to Netflix ($150 million) and more playoff games to Amazon as well (for an unknown price).

It is therefore absolutely conceivable that the league will start shopping around for more lucrative deals as soon as it is allowed to, come 2029. And streamers absolutely want whatever piece of the NFL they can lay their hands on, given the league’s popularity with both viewers and advertisers. Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria recently remarked she’d “definitely want the Sunday afternoon games” if the company were to make a bid for a weekly broadcast.

The counterpoint to all this is, as always, mounting consumer frustration with the fragmentation of sports coverage and subscription fatigue. But the league could certainly strike deals that would circumvent this. How could any cord-cutter be frustrated by Sunday afternoon football games moving from Paramount+ and/or Fox to that most essential of viewing platforms, Netflix?

And, of course, such concerns may be immaterial anyway thanks to the games’ sheer popularity. It may as well be a law of motion that where the NFL goes, viewers follow. For proof of that, you really need look no further than Tubi.