By Jason Gay
Feb. 7, 2024
A little thought experiment, just to stir up trouble:
It’s a decade from now. Actually, no—it’s three years from now. Against your better judgment, you’ve decided to host a Super Bowl party. You’ve gone out and bought a fancy television, so sharp you can see deep into Jim Nantz’s pores (inside are tiny greens at Pebble Beach). You’ve ordered the wings, perfected the chili, and the neighbors are about to call the fire department, because you’ve been smoking a whole bison in the front yard for 11 hours.
The Super Bowl is often a group viewing experience. PHOTO: I RYU/VCG/GETTY IMAGES
Your guests are here, the keg is tapped, it’s two minutes to game time, you turn on the fancy TV and—oh no. You forgot.
You owe $99.99.
Or maybe it’s $129.99, or $49.99, or $19.99. The point is that this fictional Super Bowl is now “pay-per-view,” like a boxing match, WrestleMania, or one of those comedies on the hotel TV that Mario Lopez is always telling you to watch.
You’ll need to pay up—or you’re going to miss Taylor Swift singing the national anthem with her adorable daughter, Kelsey.
Relax: We’re not there. Not yet.
Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers will be on CBS broadcast television, available to you whether or not you have cable, steal cable, cut the cord, stream on your phone, or solder a fork to a coat hanger to get a fuzzy signal.
This is the way it’s been, and it’s worked. The Super Bowl is the most gargantuan television product in modern American life—a moon landing, once a year, with overwrought commercials—and its power comes from its durable ability to reach 100 million plus people, from the fantasy football loons to the casuals to the first-timers asking why the late Wilford Brimley is coaching the Chiefs.
Still, the TV business is changing—overall broadcast audiences are shrinking, cable subscribers are fleeing, streaming is a rising but nascent business—and the landscape is going to change, perhaps radically. On Tuesday, the Journal’s Joe Flint and Isabella Simonetti broke the news that Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney are partnering on a three-headed sports streaming outlet which will be made available to ESPN+, Hulu and Max subscribers.
It’s the re-bundling of the bundle! (Now on streaming.)
Jokes aside, this strange alliance points to an urgent tension: Networks carrying pricey sports need to figure out how to pay for the rights in an expanding but financially-nebulous streaming era.
The cable bundle, of course, was a lucrative racket in which subscribers paid for sports whether they watched sports or not. With streaming, customers pay directly for the TV they want. Advertising fees can help, but it needs to add up, when one considers the billions of dollars networks have committed to programming like the NFL.
New ideas will be explored. The NFL, despite its fussy reputation, has shown itself open to experiments—witness the uproar over last month’s “Peacock Game,” in which a playoff contest was moved to a subscribers-only streaming channel. Many fans went berserk, social media roiled, politicians reacted as if Roger Goodell had bitten the top off the Washington Monument—but around 23 million watched, according to the network’s estimate.
A pay-per-view Super Bowl? John Skipper, the former ESPN boss, now the co-founder/CEO of Meadowlark Media, raised the possibility in an interview a while back, almost as a casual thought bubble. He’s since grown more bullish.
“The more I think it through, the more I think it actually will happen sooner than I expected,” Skipper told me. “Because it makes great financial sense.”
“As sports rights go up, you’re going to see the people who buy sports rights look for other ways to rationalize the acquisition,” he continued. “They’re going to have to do that by figuring out smart ways to help their overall business, including the transition to streaming.”
To be clear: If you’ve paid for cable, or for streamers with NFL rights like Amazon Prime, or for Sunday Ticket on YouTube, you’re already paying for the NFL. As for pay-per-view, the NFL’s existing TV deals run through 2033, so any bold venture before then would presumably need league cooperation.
In theory, it could be a stand-alone NFL pay-per-view, like what you see with a prize fight, or, more likely, an additional fee tacked onto an existing partner’s streaming service. There would be incentives to subscribe. Commercials would almost surely remain. Ads are a prized Super Bowl revenue stream, and if you’ve ever been angrily shushed during a break, you know the commercials are an event unto themselves.
In the meantime, the ground is shifting very fast. Bob Arum, the boxing maestro and pay-per-view pioneer, said he was dubious on a PPV Super Bowl a year ago. He’s changed his mind.
“The deal they made with Peacock—that was effectively pay-per-view,” Arum said. “The next step is more playoff games [on other streamers]. I think it’s all moving toward pay-per-view.”
Arum knows the reach of broadcast TV—he promoted the 1978 rematch between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks which ran on ABC and attracted an audience of 90 million people on ABC. At the time, it was an all-time record for a televised sporting event.
“Then it was succeeded by a Super Bowl,” Arum said.
I asked him what sort of price could be charged for a Super Bowl.
“You could touch around $100,” Arum said. “Very few people watch the Super Bowl by themselves. You watch with numerous people, so when you spread the price around, it’s not that great.”
I know, I know. This is the part of the column where you’re about to throw your phone, tablet or print copy of the Journal across the room and say you’re never going to watch football again. I don’t like it, either. I don’t want to be in the position of having to charge my children to watch the Super Bowl on TV with me.
But I’d definitely charge them. I’d charge the cat 10 bucks. I don’t care.
The good news is that the NFL sounds like it’s in no hurry to change. Goodell firmly pushed back on the concept of a streaming-only Super Bowl when asked about it this week.
“Certainly not in my time,” said Goodell, whose current deal runs through early 2027. “One of the secrets of our success is we are really committed to broadcast television.”
Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, underlined the same position to me this week. Schroeder is gangbusters on ideas like CBS partner Nickelodeon’s Super Bowl alternative broadcast—in which kiddies unmoved by Tony Romo can see the game transformed to the SpongeBob SquarePants underwater universe—but he’s adamant that the game’s strength is its reach.
“We really like our model,” Schroeder told me. “Our partners have done a great job with our model, and we’ll continue to innovate and build and evolve around it, but the foundation will be around broadcast going forward.”
Translation: My cat is off the hook for that $10, at least for the time being.
Television is in a turbulent place, however, and there will be additional pressure to monetize programming. Though pay-per-view sounds preposterous, the idea isn’t going away. Until then, the Super Bowl remains available to all. Meow.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
This Wall Street Journal article was legally licensed by AdvisorStream.
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