There are six time-related viewing windows the NFL measures every week. Through six weeks, the NFL’s ratings were down in 22 of 36 windows.
The NFL’s average household rating is currently 25.1, down from 26.9 over the same period last year, and the 28.1-28.7 range where it sat from 2013-15.
I hope the NFL doesn’t blame rating declines on anthem protests. First, the year-over-year numbers were down last year too. Second, as an avid NFL fan, the real issue is that the NFL makes it hard to watch games.
The NFL is the only thing I watch on normal, linear TV, so last year we cut the cord and watched the Seahawks over-the-air. This was mostly fine, but there were a few hiccups:
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A couple of the games were unwatchable. The local broadcast antennas are somewhat occluded by a nearby hill, so the link is pretty marginal and during heavy storms the signal dropped out. Unacceptable.
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Monday Night Football is only available on ESPN, which isn’t available over-the-top. Luckily my millennial brother-in-law still had cable. Now ESPN does stream their games,1 but ESPN’s app is garbage because you can’t pause the game or record it for later watching. Also unacceptable.
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OTA only worked for local games and whatever the networks wanted to show in the other time-slot. In a house with two fantasy managers, we wanted be able to watch any game. Straw draped over a proverbial camel’s back.
So this year we caved and got NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV. We got a good deal, so it’s not completely insane, but it definitely rubs me the wrong way that it was the only option to be able to watch all the games.
If the NFL really cared about viewership they’d make their product as widely available as possible. Stream games on Twitter and Amazon and YouTube and NFL.com and every set top box in the land. Let people buy the whole season or games al la carte. Pressure EPSN to make their streaming experience not suck. Eliminate blackouts. Allow broadcast networks to play out-of-market games on competing networks against the home team. In other words, if you want people to watch, make it easy to watch.2
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so you can watch that way without a cable subscription if you were to, purely hypothetically, borrow a friends cable credentials ↩
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I’m not naïve. The reason they don’t do any of this is that they don’t actually care how many people are watching. They care about making money, and all those ideas violate myriad byzantine licensing agreements. They want viewers, but on their own terms. ↩