In all the talk about major sports shifting to streaming, there has been no story that garnered as many headlines as Netflix’s NFL push, with the streaming giant set to stream two games on Christmas Day this year.
Those games, however, will be produced by CBS Sports, which is working with Netflix on the event (Netflix is expected to have its own on-air talent roster, and is also working with another production company and shoulder programming like pre- and post-game coverage, though specifics are still TBD).
CBS Sports president David Berson, speaking to reporters at Paramount Global headquarters Wednesday morning, said that his team was happy to work with Netflix and the NFL on the Christmas Day games.
“I actually said, ‘Welcome to the party,’” Berson says. “I think that this sport is so powerful that more entities continuing to prop it up is going to benefit everyone, I firmly believe that.”
“Listen, we’re still the home of the AFC, we have half the games on Sunday afternoons, we have over 100 games, we’re really well positioned in this regard,” he added, after being asked whether he thinks Netflix will ultimately be a competitor for rights. “[Netflix has] two games on one day, and if it generates more interest, great.”
Of course CBS isn’t producing the games out of the goodness of its heart. Berson confirms that Netflix will pay them a production fee, and CBS will be the rightsholder and distribution partner in the four local markets involved, including in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, where CBS owns local stations, and in Kansas City and Houston, where there are CBS affiliates.
“We’re gonna have promotional opportunities within the games themselves, and obviously we have a larger advertising relationship that comes into play here too,” Berson says. “We’re benefiting financially and strategically in doing this, but it works really well for both parties.”
“As for our decision to do it, the NFL and Netflix are longstanding partners, we have great relationships with the both of them,” Berson added. “The fact that we were able to work something out in relatively short order to truly have a win-win-win deal is great. So we’re looking forward to this, we are thrilled that the NFL and Netflix continue to recognize our leadership and expertise in producing games.”
But Berson also noted that CBS Sports is also in the business of exploring the frontiers of what an NFL broadcast can look like. For the fifth season in a row, Nickelodeon will have a live NFL game, with dedicated announcers and plenty of slime.
Berson says the Nick game will be one of the company’s two Wild Card playoff matchups, with details still to be determined.
“A lot of folks talk about different alternate feeds and doing stuff like that, but this is genuinely bringing an incremental audience and cultivating that next generation of fans, we are not siphoning off viewers who might have watched on CBS to watch this,” he says. “It’s an entirely different platform, different age group, and I’m thrilled that this has been so well received.”
And while there are no immediate plans to offer other alternative telecasts (like ESPN2’s “Manningcast,” for example), the company does “continue to look at other things.”
“There’s lots to talk about. Is there a gambling-only feed or something like that? Us and everyone’s looking at this kind of stuff,” Berson says, tossing out Comedy Central as another Paramount brand that could create a fun alternate telecast. “We have nothing to say at this moment in time, but I think you’ll continue to see those kinds of things play a larger role in the media landscape. But we also know that the large majority of fans want to sit back and watch the product that our experts can put forth for them, even when those alternate feeds are done, it’s single-digit percentages that are consuming that.”
And he also addressed a concern that comes around every four years: Will the presidential election steal away viewers who would otherwise be watching NFL games?
“It takes attention away in some respects, but fans are also looking for what they love and sports is an escape,” he says. “I think that you have to go in knowing that it’s gonna suck a lot of air out of the media landscape, but yet, the NFL partnership is gonna continue to drive interest, and so it might have some impact, but we can only control what we control.”