The NFL TV ratings and live stream numbers for the entire 2016-17 season are starting to be finalized. What both elements suggest is that the National Football League needs to shift its emphasis for how its audience will consume its product in the future.
The Future of NFL Broadcasting Isn’t on Television
All the information coming through various sources are suggesting the same thing: younger audience members, whom the NFL needs in order to keep its business robust, are consuming its product on the Internet, not television.
While NFL games overall still proved to be one of the strongest products on television over the months of the season, the numbers were still an overall decline from the 2015-16 season.
Taking Super Bowl LI for example, the TV rating was an overall three percent decline from Super Bowl L in 2016. The total number of television viewers fell a half of a percent from 2016, to 111.3 million.
The television broadcast got a 37.1 rating among viewers between the ages of 18-49, which is also a decline from the previous season. In the 18-49 category, Super Bowl L got a 37.7.
There was one area in which the audience for Super Bowl LI actually grew from Super Bowl L, however. In fact, this outlet has been growing steadily for the past five Super Bowls.
Streaming NFL Games Bucking the Downward Trend
For the past five seasons in a row, the streaming audience for the Super Bowl has grown. From Super Bowl 46 to this year’s incarnation, the streaming audience is up almost 500 percent, an increase of nearly 1.4 million viewers. The Super Bowl isn’t an outlier in this trend, either. It’s consistent through the rest of the NFL season.
The Week 7 game between the New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams from London saw a streaming audience increase of 125 percent from the comparable streaming-exclusive game in 2016. Six regular season Thursday night games, which were streamed exclusively on Twitter, boasted a strong and consistent audience that averaged 350,000 viewers.
Diving further into the Twitter numbers reveals just how much of the audience was part of a younger generation of football fans.
Twitter’s Age Demographics for NFL Live Game Streams
In a letter to its shareholders covering the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, Twitter denoted that 55 percent of its audience for its NFL live game streams were under 25 years of age.
Combining this information with the declining television ratings among younger viewers and the burgeoning Internet audience for NFL games, the conclusion is clear: younger fans are becoming more likely to watch games online than on television.
The importance of that fact obviously grows with time, as the trend continues and older generations of fans who are more likely to watch NFL games on television begin to fade. If this trend continues, it should dictate how the NFL spends its resources in the future.
It’d be foolish for the NFL to abandon its television products and put all of its eggs in the live stream basket. The television broadcasts are still one of the most robust and lucrative products available, and bring the league a lot of revenue.
It would be similarly foolish for the NFL to not devote additional resources toward developing its live streaming products, however. The day that more fans watch games online than on television may be a long ways off, but with the recent trends taken into consideration, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
