On Wednesday, Netflix streamed a pair of NFL games, for the first time ever. It was part of the league’s ongoing effort to steal Christmas from the NBA.
It was successful, relative to the lack of complaints regarding buffering, outages, and blurred images. Eventually, we’ll find out whether it was successful, relative to the audiences that would have been generated for Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans if the games had been broadcast by a three-letter network.
From the league’s perspective, it was a success the moment the contract was signed. For an extra $150 million, the league peeled a couple of games away from the Sunday slate and sold them not to an existing broadcast partner, but to a new kid on the block that might be looking to box out one of the established NFL TV outlets when the rights are auctioned later this decade.
For now, Netflix has announced that it was the second-most-streamed live sports event on the platform, after the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight. And while some in the media have taken that number and trumpeted it without context, it means nothing.
Netflix doesn’t have a robust history of streaming live sports events. If the NFL games hadn’t come in second to the Tyson-Paul fight, that would have counted as a massive failure.
It’s already a failure, in one sense. The NFL is the biggest bully on the sports block, but it couldn’t beat the latest iteration of Jake Paul’s real-life boxing fantasy camp?
We’ll get the true viewing numbers soon enough. And plenty will pass along whatever is in the Netflix release, without analysis or skepticism.
