After a fun Saturday with your family, you sit down ready to watch the second playoff game of the 2024 NFL Postseason. Miami Dolphins versus Kansas City Chiefs. Tua Tagovailoa versus Patrick Mahomes. Tyreek Hill versus Travis Kelce. You turn on your TV and flip around through each channel asking yourself, where is the game?
You eventually become restless and decide to look up where your Saturday night plans will be hosted. To your surprise, the game is on Peacock, a streaming service run by NBCUniversal that was charging $5.99 to watch the game.
While this fee is rather small and seems harmless, it is a deeper sign that eventually, the pay-per-view (PPV) format will become the norm of sports broadcasting. Football is arguably the most popular sport in the United States and this initiative will not permit some to watch their favorite sport.
NBCUniversal paid $110 million to receive the rights to the playoff game and it was well worth it. The matchup turned into the most live streamed event in the history of the United States, racking up 23 million viewers. This success will only urge other streaming services to experiment this style, and change sports broadcasting forever.
The advantages for the viewer are rather slim, but for the provider they are endless. To start, no company can never have enough money, and this format is another opportunity for limitless cash flow. Another add on is that viewers will now have a monthly subscription to the service. Paying for the game gives viewers access to all shows and movies on the service, creating the likely possibility of one getting hooked and renewing their subscription.
However, the NFL is not the first sport to use this method. The MLB streams a weekly Friday night game on Apple TV, which received similar backlash. On the other hand, sports like UFC, WWE and MMA have been using the PPV style for many years, and have accustomed their viewers to paying for every single event.
In a way, sports that use this method have created an unbreakable trap for viewers to fall into. A die-hard sports fan is not going to give up watching their favorite sport in action because they have to spend a couple of bucks. Each enthusiast will give the services what they want, and act like a mouse walking into a cheese trap.
That being said, this article is not asking you to avoid watching sports in this format, because that is unreasonable. Rather, to be wary of the power that streaming services possess and how they can use this power to hurt the consumer.
