The holiday season is a time for family, food—and, at least for some people, American football. As in previous years, teams in the National Football League (NFL) played on Christmas day, watched live by millions. Unusually, though, the broadcaster this year was Netflix, which live-streamed two games (and a musical interlude by Beyoncé).
That it went off with only minor hitches was a gift for the company. Netflix’s previous forays into live sport have at times been shambolic. A celebrity boxing match in November between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson was beset by technical problems. “We crashed the site,” Mr Paul bragged after he beat his 58-year-old opponent. A live golfing event featured broken microphones and an animal-rights protester.
Netflix has big ambitions for live sport. American Football is set to stay in the streamer’s Christmas line-up for at least the next two years. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Raw, a hit show, will leave traditional TV for a weekly spot on the streaming site from January 6th. Netflix has also bagged the American rights for the next two women’s football (soccer) World Cups.
Netflix used to insist it would stay on the sidelines when it came to screening live sport. Cost was one reason. Broadcasting rights are expensive: the NFL pocketed $75m a game from Netflix for this year’s Christmas screenings, and the decade-long WWE deal cost a knockout $5bn. Then there were the technical challenges. Handling so many concurrent viewers is a headache for a streaming service designed for fragmented viewership.
But big sporting events attract prestige and, more important, subscribers. For all its mishaps, Jake Paul v Mike Tyson drew a record-breaking audience—and 1.4m new subscriptions, according to Antenna Data, a research firm. Live sport offers ample downtime before and during games, making it well-suited to ad breaks, a lucrative source of revenue. Even subscribers to Netflix’s ad-free packages were shown commercials during the NFL broadcast.
Challenges remain. To the relief of Netflix’s engineers, though perhaps not its bosses, viewing figures for its Christmas NFL games were good but not exceptional. The audience peaked at more than 27m, around half that drawn by Jake Paul v Mike Tyson. By comparison, the Super Bowl, the NFL’s biggest annual event, attracts well over 100m viewers. Streaming to such multitudes could be technically fraught.
Still, Netflix has plenty of other options. Besides American football and the usual roster of classic Christmas films, the streamer had another hit programme on December 25th: a recording of a crackling log fire.
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