NFL broadcast guidelines “as fan-friendly as possible”

The NFL is under fire this summer as a defendant in a class action lawsuit alleging the league price gouged its Sunday Ticket product on YouTube TV. As a result, Commissioner Roger Goodell was forced to take the stand and testify in favor of the league's broadcast business practices.

In an interview with Pat McAfee on Wednesday ahead of Thursday's season opener in Kansas City, Goodell claimed the NFL's broadcast policies are “as fan-friendly as possible,” but stressed that games would be available live and in-market to fans everywhere and defended recent exclusive streaming deals with Peacock and Netflix.

“Every game in those home markets is shown on free TV,” Goodell said. “Eighty to 90 percent of our games are shown on free TV, and that's far more than any other league in the world … that's why we've defended that so strongly. Because we believe our media policy is as fan-friendly as it gets.”

As for the NFL's new Netflix deal to broadcast two games on Christmas Day for $75 million each, Goodell said the appeal from the league's perspective lies in Netflix's global reach and the streamer's desire to “put a different spin” on the broadcast.

“They really wanted to get into live sports with the NFL, and we liked that. They wanted to win Christmas Day, and we liked that too. And I think this was an opportunity for us to get our games on a platform where we know a lot of our fans are,” Goodell explained. “And we need to get on those platforms.”

Goodell stressed that the NFL's agreement with Netflix was not just about making the broadcast “a little different than what you see on the other providers,” but also about reaching a larger audience.

“Ultimately, the most important thing for us is reach,” Goodell said. “If someone paid us a lot of money and only had a small audience, we wouldn't do it because that doesn't help us much.”

While this may seem at odds with the league's strategy of broadcasting exclusive games on NBC Universal's much smaller Peacock streaming service (including this week's Friday night game in Brazil), Goodell said the league saw it as an opportunity to build a new distribution channel in the streaming space with a long-time partner.

“And it worked,” Goodell said. “Now Peacock has the NBA, they have the Olympics. That now provides a better platform and a better service for our fans, and ultimately the NFL has contributed to that.”

The class action lawsuit accused the NFL of rejecting ESPN's offer to sell the Sunday Ticket product for $70 annually in favor of a deal with Google and YouTube that costs customers $349. After a judge initially ruled against the league, the ruling was overturned in August.

The plaintiffs recently filed an appeal.

In the meantime, the league continues to increase revenue and reach from its national streaming-exclusive broadcasts. Goodell isn't wrong when he says local fans will always be able to watch their favorite teams' games for free, but as the league's popularity and reach grows with these new deals, the more fans are exposed to them, the more they might cheer for players and teams outside of their market.

And in order to follow the best teams and players, fans increasingly have to pay for services such as cable television (Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock) to watch the NFL.

[The Pat McAfee Show on YouTube]