The year is 2045. Fourth week of February. After a grueling 21-week regular season and five rounds of playoffs, the Super Bowl matchup is ready: Buffalo Bills vs. London Jaguars. The NFL expects 130 million viewers to stream the game on Netflix, which serves as the exclusive home of the Super Bowl following a multibillion-dollar deal the company signed with the league in 2040.
Those without a subscription to the streaming service can pay $149 for a one-month trial that includes access to the game via one of Netflix’s 10 Super Bowl Megacast feeds. A popular Megacast option will be the Legends Room, where retired players Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and CJ Stroud interact live with spectators as they watch the game. Adam Amin, Greg Olsen and Laura Rutledge will call the game on Netflix’s flagship NFL channel.
Does it seem far-fetched? Maybe it would have been 10 years ago. While a reflection exercise on the NFL Making the Super Bowl a pay-per-view event is nothing new, what is new is the era we live in. The first-ever exclusive NFL playoff game live-streamed on Peacock was a seismic moment.
Peacock paid $110 million to air the Kansas City Chiefs’ 26-7 win over the Miami Dolphins in the AFC wild-card round in a bid to boost its tally of 30 million subscribers. Antenna, a research firm that tracks streaming data, estimated that Peacock had 2.8 million signups over a three-day period around the Wild Card Game, averaging 23 million viewers. It was the largest subscriber acquisition moment Antenna has ever measured.
Will the paid Super Bowl be inevitable in the next 40 years or so?
“Given that the cord-cutting rate is above 7%, or five million homes lost every year, the odds are very good that the Super Bowl will be on a streaming platform in ‘our’ lifetime,” he said Michael Nathanson, co-founder and senior managing director of research firm MoffettNathanson, which provides trends in media, communications and technology to institutional investors.
NFL officials have repeatedly said the league is committed to televising and widely distributing games. Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, told reporters last month, including Atletico, that “you can’t reach 190 million people over the course of the year without very broad distribution of your content, and that’s always been a cornerstone for us. … All of our games are broadcast on television, at least in their market, and probably 90% of our games are broadcast as the primary platform. It remains really important for us.”
Sean McManus, longtime president of CBS Sports, who will retire from his post later this year, noted that such a conversation can’t happen until the NFL’s current set of media rights expire. The league’s media rights deals with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon are worth about $110 billion and run through the 2033 season.

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“There is no immediate concern,” McManus said. “(NFL commissioner) Roger Goodell has been very clear that wide distribution is part of the reason the NFL is as successful as it is. Yes, the NFL expanded with some games on Peacock, including a playoff game. …But when you have 56 million people watching the AFC championship game (on CBS), it’s a great success story. “I can’t speak for Netflix, Amazon or Apple on whether it makes business sense for them to pay hundreds of millions for a playoff game, but I know that linear television is extremely important to the success of the NFL.”
Along with McManus, David Levy, former president of Turner Sports and now co-CEO of Horizon Sports & Experiences, a sports marketing and consulting firm, also believes the Super Bowl will remain on free-to-air television for years to come.
“Broadcast and free-to-air is still the largest reach vehicle,” Levy said. “You’re always building your next generation of fans and they want the place to get maximum coverage. In thirty years? “I can’t answer that because I don’t know who will be the commissioner of the NFL and who will own these teams.”
Levy was very positive about the appearance of NFL product on streaming services. But he noted an important point: Any streaming service exclusively broadcasting the Super Bowl would need its own production capabilities and sufficient proof of concept with production elements where the NFL would feel confident putting its ownership in their hands more important. This isn’t something Netflix or Apple have at the moment.
“Everyone expects to turn on the television and watch a Super Bowl,” said Tracy Wolfson, the NFL sideline reporter commentating Sunday’s game for CBS. “I think it alienates those who can’t watch it. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more playoff games there, but I think when it comes to the Super Bowl, the question is how many eyes and making sure it’s available for everyone to watch.”

A Super Bowl behind a streaming paywall seems far-fetched. But 10 years ago, it was hard to imagine a Chiefs-Dolphins playoff game on something called Peacock. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
William Mao, senior vice president of global media rights at Octagon, a sports and entertainment agency, believes we are unlikely to see a Super Bowl broadcast exclusively on a streaming service in the United States in the next 20 to 25 years if it is free. -watch -air TV penetration (remains larger than any single-subscription video-on-demand base. He said his answer will only change when (or if) a paid streamer has subscriber reach close to penetration in clear today.
“As long as the Super Bowl continues to be the most-watched live television broadcast by a wide margin, it will remain available free-to-air in some capacity,” Mao predicted. “Aggregating more than 100 million viewers on a single broadcast remains too large an advertising draw to be paid-only, and all signs point to the Super Bowl’s continued growth in ratings and advertising rates across its current distribution.
“Could there come a point in the future where something else knocks the Super Bowl off the top? Of course, never say never. But right now the gap between the first and second most watched broadcasts in America exceeds 60 million viewers. So why would the NFL upset its dominant and extremely profitable position?
Mao pointed out that the Super Bowl is unique because it attracts so many casual viewers. People watch the game for a variety of reasons, including commercials and musical performances during halftime. He wondered whether top musical artists would continue to perform the halftime show at an affordable cost if the broadcast was behind a paywall and not guaranteed to reach the same size audience. There would be there will also be some people in Congress interested if the NFL had gone this route.
This discussion seems much more relevant in 2024 because of the Peacock game. We don’t know how many new subscribers will stick with Peacock long-term, and the game wasn’t 100% streaming exclusively as it appeared on free-to-air television in Kansas City and Miami. But the NFL has put one of its premium inventory games behind a paywall.
“Peacock’s numbers were solid, and the broadcast provided an informative benchmark for future NFL games that will be similarly distributed,” Mao said. “For example, will a 40% lower ad load become the norm for streaming games? But there are still many steps between moving one of the many wildcard games to a streamer and moving the biggest game of the year. In my opinion, the Super Bowl should be one of the last things to remain exclusively behind a paywall in the NFL’s portfolio.
It’s not easy to price a Super Bowl behind a paywall. Is there a cap on what is by far the most popular community television experience among Americans each year?as well as nearly nine million Canadians)? Returning to the hypothetical lede of this article: let’s say Netflix got 30 million new subscribers for a Super Bowl experience for $149. That’s almost $4.5 billion. This does not include advertising revenue. There would definitely be a lot of subscribers who drop out after the Super Bowl, for sure, but there would also be those who stick with the product and then pay the annual subscription.
“I don’t think the issue is about the price of a single game,” Mao said. “If the Super Bowl were to have a streaming-exclusive future, it would be more likely to be part of a larger set of rights.”
When I asked the price question to Nathanson, he said it was hard to figure out a definitive number.
“That’s a good question,” Nathanson said. “How many people have paid $6 for a pay-per-view game on Peacock? “It would obviously be multiple (more than that).”
It’s unlikely we’ll see the NFL go down this path in the short to medium term. But ask yourself if, in 2014, you imagined you’d ever have to pay to watch an NFL playoff game.

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(Photo from a promotional performance for Super Bowl LVIII on CBS outside the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)