NFL, Peacock Prep For First Streaming-Only Playoff Game

Comcast Corp.'s heavy investment into its streaming platform will take center stage Saturday night with Peacock's exclusive rights to the Miami Dolphins vs. Kansas City Chiefs NFL wild card game. Having to sign up for a $5.99 subscription to watch a game that's typically nationally televised may seem like a standalone annoyance for fans, but The Philadelphia Business Journal cites experts who say it's part of a longer term vision for Comcast and the NFL.

On the surface, the NFL will likely see a dip in viewership on the game, the first playoff matchup to be broadcast solely on a streaming service. Last year's six wild card round games averaged about 28.4 million viewers, a 4% drop from the year prior, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Peacock has a total of 30 million subscribers at last tally in December. That comes as Comcast expects some $2.8 billion in losses attributed to Peacock in 2023, including what was reportedly a $110 million bid to secure rights to Saturday night's game. Comcast officials have said their peak losses in Peacock will happen in 2023 and steadily improve from there.

The Peacock playoff game is perhaps the loudest salvo in the heated sports streaming wars to this point. As leagues are slowly migrating their content to streaming, experts see a clear and inevitable future for sports broadcasts. The NFL took the biggest jump in making a primetime playoff game an exclusively streamed event and set the bar for future bids on major events.

The streaming-only playoff game comes as Comcast is hitting its peak investment in Peacock in an effort to compete with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other longstanding streaming platforms. As people cut cords and content — including sports — is continuously moving to streaming, Peacock comes all the more important. Even with Comcast’s presence in the traditional cable space, Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett of Moffett Nathanson said Comcast is “throwing fuel on the fire that’s burning down the linear ecosystem.”

Moffett expects to see the cost of securing rights and broadcasting the game more so reflected in Comcast's upcoming earnings than any significant revenue bump, which he said would be "immaterial."

"You have to pay for the content this quarter but the payback will happen slowly over time in the form of more viewers and more subscribers that generate more advertising," Moffett said.

Moffett also pointed to another potential hidden benefit of the game being broadcast over the internet instead of traditional cable airwaves: it gives Comcast a chance to show off its broadband network. The internet will have "its busiest moment ever" during the Peacock playoff game, Moffett said.

Comcast President Mike Cavanagh concurred, saying at a December investor conference that Comcast expects the Peacock playoff game to be "the biggest event in concurrent usage" on the internet. The company's connectivity and platforms sector of the business makes nearly double the revenue that comes from content and experiences.

It's a position unique to Comcast, where the company is hosting the broadcast of the game through its regular NBC NFL crew, the platform it's streaming on in Peacock and in many cases, the network it's streaming over. It will be an important test for both Comcast and the NFL, Moffett and Maxcy said.

Moffett and Maxcy, see it as the beginning of a new era in the sports streaming world. The ice was broken with Amazon Prime's exclusive rights to "Thursday Night Football" beginning in September 2022, but a playoff game being aired strictly over the internet takes sports streaming to another level.