ESPN’s Monday Night Football telecast helped the sports network barely beat out Fox News Channel for top honors in primetime last week.

ESPN averaged 2.56 million viewers for the week of September 16-22 to top Fox News Channel’s 2.51 million viewers, ending the news network’s three-week winning streak, according to Nielsen numbers supplied by Fox News.

The sports network was bolstered by its September 16 Philadelphia Eagles-Atlanta Falcons Monday Night Football telecast, which drew 13.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen.  

MSNBC finished third with 1.4 million viewers, followed by USA Network’s 780,000 viewers and CNN’s 681,000 watchers.

Hallmark Channel was sixth with 635,000 viewers, followed by HGTV (540,000 viewers), Food Network (496,000), TBS (493,000) and INSP (486,000). 

Fox News pushed its total day win streak to 37 weeks, averaging 1.5 million viewers. MSNBC finished second with 952,000 viewers, followed by ESPN (848,000 viewers), CNN (517,000) and Hallmark Channel (349,000), according to Nielsen. 

Controlling 93 of the top 100 most watched U.S. TV programming events last year, the National Football League can command an audience of 12 million ESPN viewers just by convening a room full of college-age jocks in suits, sitting around with their families and girlfriends, nervously waiting for their name to be called, as last month’s NFL draft once again revealed. 

So when the most influential content source in all of technology, media and telecom announces the primetime games schedules for three media partners collectively paying it around $4.65 billion a season ... well, it kind of matters. 

Also read: Amazon Touts Vastly Improved 2024 'Thursday Night Football' Schedule Full of Divisional Rivalries, Fewer Turkeys

Below are the 2024 regular season game schedules for ABC/ESPN's Monday Night Football, NBC's Sunday Night Football and Amazon Prime Video's Thursday Night Football. Next TV, which is hopeful that its Seahawks can turn things around in 2024 after sunsetting venerable head coach Pete Carroll, added some notes on how we think each package shapes up as a TV viewing choice. 

Monday Night Football

Disney is paying the NFL an average of $2.7 billion a season for the rights to show the venerable Monday Night Football package on ESPN and ABC. 

It's not only the prestigious and priciest (by far) of the NFL's three primetime TV packages, it also has the most games (23), with five Monday night doubleheaders split across ESPN cable and ABC broadcast. 

Monday Night Football averaged 17.4 million viewers in 2023, up 30% from 2022. 

Our take on the 2024 MNF schedule: The opening night showdown between New York Jets and Aaron Rodgers, playing his first game in a year following achilles tendon surgery, and the Super Bowl runner-up San Francisco 49ers could draw 20 million or more viewers. 

Disney gets the old-world “America's Team,”  the Dallas Cowboys, twice. Like a lot of football fans, we don’t think the Cowboys have actually been relevant since Troy Aikman wore a helmet. But they remain the league’s biggest regular season TV draw. And our analysis here is based on audience potential.

MNF features the “new” America’s team, the Detroit Lions, two times, as well — including in a late season rematch of the 2023 NFC title game against the San Francisco 49ers. The Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs are on a couple of times, too, hosting the NFC South Division Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers in week 9.

But we don't see a single division rivalry game on the schedule until week 15, when the Chicago Bears and No. 1 draft pick Caleb Williams visit the Minnesota Vikings ... in a matchup that may not have playoff implications, with both teams breaking in new quarterbacks. 

Certainly, a lot of things will be learned about the teams from now and Sept. 9, when MNF hosts its first game. But based on what we know right now, there's just not enough on the schedule to get $2.7 billion dollars’ worth of excited about. 

Week 1 (Sept. 9, 2024): New York Jets at San Francisco 49ers (simulcast on ABC)
Week 2 (Sept. 16): Atlanta Falcons at Philadelphia Eagles
Week 3 (Sept. 23): Jacksonville Jaguars at Buffalo Bills (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Washington Commanders at Cincinnati Bengals (8:15 p.m. ET, ABC)
Week 4 (Sept. 30): Tennessee Titans at Miami Dolphins (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Seattle Seahawks at Detroit Lions (8:15 p.m. ET, ABC)
Week 5 (Oct. 7): New Orleans Saints at Kansas City Chiefs
Week 6 (Oct. 14): Buffalo Bills at New York Jets
Week 7 (Oct. 21): Baltimore Ravens at Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Los Angeles Chargers at Arizona Cardinals (9 p.m. ET, ESPN+)
Week 8 (Oct. 28): New York Giants at Pittsburgh Steelers
Week 9 (Nov. 4): Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Kansas City Chiefs
Week 10 (Nov. 11): Miami Dolphins at Los Angeles Rams
Week 11 (Nov. 18): Houston Texans at Dallas Cowboys
Week 12 (Nov. 25): Baltimore Ravens at Los Angeles Chargers
Week 13 (Dec. 2): Cleveland Browns at Denver Broncos
Week 14: (Dec. 9): Cincinnati Bengals at Dallas Cowboys
Week 15 (Dec. 16): Chicago Bears at Minnesota Vikings (8 p.m. ET, ABC)
Atlanta Falcons at Las Vegas Raiders (8:30 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Week 16 (Dec. 23): New Orleans Saints at Green Bay Packers
Week 17 (Dec. 30): Detroit Lions at San Francisco 49ers
Week 18 (Saturday, Jan. 4): Doubleheader TBA

Sunday Night Football

Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit is paying the league $950 million this season for a package of 18 regular season games. NBC is coming off a 2023 campaign that averaged 21.4 million viewers, up about 8% vs. 2022. 

Our take on the 2024 MNF schedule: NBC will feature the Cowboys three times, including in two history-laden matchups with the Pittsburgh Steelers and 49ers. The Chiefs and Lions will be on SNF twice, as well.

There aren’t many divisional rivalry games, but there are plenty of contests that feel like early conference playoff matchups, including the Los Angeles Rams playing the Lions in the Sept. 8 opener, the Buffalo Bills visiting the Baltimore Ravens on Sept. 29, and the L.A. Chargers at the Chiefs on Dec. 8. 

There also aren’t a ton of appearances from teams that didn't make the playoffs last year. And those that did make the cut are in interesting matchups, including the Seattle Seahawks (9-8 last year and barely missing the postseason) hosting the resurgent Green Bay Packers on Dec. 15. 

This seems to be a strong schedule for the licensing money NBCU is paying the NFL. 

Week 1 (Sept. 8, 2024): Los Angeles Rams at Detroit Lions
Week 2 (Sept. 15): Chicago Bears at Houston Texans
Week 3 (Sept. 22): Kansas City Chiefs at Atlanta Falcons
Week 4 (Sept. 29): Buffalo Bills at Baltimore Ravens
Week 5 (Oct. 6): Dallas Cowboys at Pittsburgh Steelers
Week 6 (Oct. 13): Cincinnati Bengals at New York Giants
Week 7 (Oct. 20): New York Jets at Pittsburgh Steelers
Week 8 (Oct. 27): Dallas Cowboys at San Francisco 49ers
Week 9 (Nov. 3): Jacksonville Jaguars at Philadelphia Eagles
Week 10 (Nov. 10): Detroit Lions at Houston Texans
Week 11 (Nov. 17): Indianapolis Colts at New York Jets
Week 12 (Nov. 24): Philadelphia Eagles at Los Angeles Rams
Week 13 (Dec. 1): San Francisco 49ers at Buffalo Bills
Week 14 (Dec. 8): Los Angeles Chargers at Kansas City Chiefs
Week 15 (Dec. 15): Green Bay Packers at Seattle Seahawks
Week 16 (Dec. 22): Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Dallas Cowboys
Week 17 (Dec. 29): Miami Dolphins at Cleveland Browns
Week 18: TBD

Thursday Night Football

Amazon is paying the NFL an average of $1 billion a season (also through 2033, like all NFL TV deals) for TNF. In the package’s inaugural campaign on Amazon Prime Video in 2022, it was a meme as to how many turkey games were featured matching teams with no postseason relevance. 

Things got better last season, with viewership increasing 24% year over year to 11.86 million streaming fans, on average. And this year, we think Amazon really scored, with 12 of its 16 games featuring divisional rivalry matchups. 

In fact, we think this is the most intriguing of the three primetime NFL game slates. 

Week 1 (preseason, Aug. 22): Indianapolis Colts at Cincinnati Bengals
Week 2 (Sept. 12): Buffalo Bills at Miami Dolphins
Week 3 (Sept. 19): New England Patriots at New York Jets
Week 4 (Sept. 26): Dallas Cowboys at New York Giants
Week 5 (Oct. 3): Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Atlanta Falcons
Week 6 (Oct. 10): San Francisco 49ers at Seattle Seahawks
Week 7 (Oct. 17): Denver Broncos at New Orleans Saints
Week 8 (Oct. 24): Minnesota Vikings at Los Angeles Rams
Week 9 (Oct. 31): Houston Texans at New York Jets
Week 10 (Nov. 7): Cincinnati Bengals at Baltimore Ravens
Week 11 (Nov. 14): Washington Commanders at Philadelphia Eagles
Week 12 (Nov. 21): Pittsburgh Steelers at Cleveland Browns
Week 13 (Black Friday, Nov. 29): Las Vegas Raiders at Kansas City Chiefs
Week 14 (Dec. 5): Green Bay Packers at Detroit Lions
Week 15 (Dec. 12): Los Angeles Rams at San Francisco 49ers
Week 16 (Dec. 19): Cleveland Browns at Cincinnati Bengals
Week 17 (Dec. 26): Seattle Seahawks at Chicago Bears

ESPN has extended its multiplatform media rights production partnership with Peyton and Eli Manning’s Omaha Productions, which includes the network’s Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli simulcast.   

The nine-year deal, which runs through 2034, also includes an extension of Omaha’s sports docuseries Peyton’s Places and Eli’s Places. The agreement, which follows an original three-year agreement in 2021 and an extension announced in 2022, will continue to grow the successful content partnership between ESPN and Omaha, which will include opportunities for other collaborations across multiple platforms, said the network.

Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli, which won the 2022 Sports Emmy for Outstanding Live Series, appears opposite Monday Night Football on ESPN2 and blends real-time analysis with commentary from the brothers and former NFL quarterbacks.

ESPN racked up its second-straight primetime ratings win on the strength of Monday Night Football.

The sports network averaged 2.2 million viewers for the week of November 13-19, besting second-place Fox News Channel’s 1.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen figures supplied by Fox News. ESPN was paced by the 7.3 million viewers that watched the Nov. 13 Denver Broncos-Buffalo Bills game on the network. 

Hallmark Channel’s holiday-themed programming has helped push the network into third place with 1.4 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers and HGTV’s 738,000 watchers.

History was sixth for the week with 703,000 viewers, followed by TBS (661,000 viewers), Food Network (634,000), INSP (597,000), and USA Network (595,000).

On a 24-hour basis, Fox News blew away the competition for its ninth straight win with 1.2 million viewers. ESPN finished a distant second with 864,000 viewers, followed by MSNBC (833,000), Hallmark Channel (673,000) and CNN (456,000). 

NBA and NFL coverage helped ESPN finish first in primetime among all cable networks during the final week of October.

The sports network averaged 2.2 million viewers for the week of October 23 to October 29, topping second-place Fox News Channel, which averaged 2 million viewers for the week, according to Nielsen numbers supplied by Fox News. 

ESPN was paced by its October 23 San Francisco 49ers-Minnesota Vikings Monday Night Football game, which drew 7 million viewers, as well as its October 25 NBA season-opening telecast featuring San Antonio Spurs No. 1 draft pick Victor Wembanyama in his first pro game. That contest against the Dallas Mavericks drew nearly 3 million viewers. 

TBS finished third with 1.65 million, followed by MSNBC with 1.2 million and Hallmark Channel with 1 million viewers. Rounding out the top 10 most-watched networks for the week were TNT (973,000 viewers), HGTV (780,000), CNN (762,000), FS1 (665,000), and TLC (611,000).

On a 24-hour basis, Fox News finished first for a fifth straight week with 1.4 million viewers, followed by MSNBC (907,000), ESPN (797,000), CNN (617,000) and Hallmark Channel (551,000), according to Nielsen. 

ESPN, bolstered by Monday Night Football, last week reclaimed the top spot on the cable primetime ratings chart from Fox News Channel. 

ESPN averaged 2.6 million viewers in primetime for the week of October 2 to October 8 to finish first among all cable networks, according to Nielsen numbers supplied by Fox News. The sports network was paced by its Oct. 2 Seattle Seahawks-New York Giants Monday Night Football telecast, which drew 6.5 million viewers. The game, won by the Seahawks, also aired live on ABC.

Fox News Channel, after a two-week run at the top of the primetime chart, finished second with 2.0 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.4 million viewers. 

The opening round of the Major League Baseball playoffs bolstered several networks to top 10 primetime finishes, including TBS, which finished fourth with 925,000 viewers; ESPN2, which pulled into sixth place with 825,000 viewers; and FS1, which climbed to 10th place with 625,000 watchers. 

Hallmark Channel finished fifth with 826,000 viewers, while HGTV was seventh with 781,000 viewers. CNN (779,000 viewers) and INSP (633,000) rounded out the list. 

On a 24-hour basis, Fox News topped all networks with 1.2 million viewers, followed by MSNBC (977,000), ESPN (927,000), CNN (610,000) and Hallmark Channel (428,000), reported Nielsen. 

ESPN rode its season-opening Monday Night Football telecast to the top of the primetime basic-cable ratings chart last week.

ESPN averaged 2.7 million viewers in primetime during the week of September 11-17 to win for the second straight week, according to Nielsen numbers supplied by Fox News Channel. The sports network benefited from the more than 11 million viewers who tuned in to see its September 11 New York Jets-Buffalo Bills telecast.

Fox News finished second for the week with 1.7 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers and HGTV’s 850,000 watchers. USA Network moved into fifth place with 773,000 viewers, followed by Hallmark Channel (730,000 viewers), TLC (674,000), INSP (628,000), TBS (565,000) and Food Network (538,000).

ESPN and Fox News tied for the top spot on a total day basis with 1.1 million viewers, followed by MSNBC (805,000), HGTV (437,000) and CNN (433,000), according to Nielsen. 

With the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes extending well into the fall season, Disney-ABC has made a sensible programming move to prop up the ABC fall broadcast schedule, simulcasting 10 additional Monday Night Football games on both ABC and ESPN.

Originally, ABC had planned to run two hours of Dancing With the Stars from 8 p.m. - 10 p.m. on Mondays, with new reality spinoff The Golden Bachelor airing at 10 p.m.

The network has decided to pair The Golden Bachelor with nine-year-old sibling Bachelor in Paradise to fill Thursday primetime, while DWTS will move to Tuesdays, starting September 26. 

Disney had earlier planned to simulcast Monday night's MNF game between the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers on ABC and ESPN+, with linear ESPN and ESPN 2 showing a slightly earlier starting game between the New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers

So Monday night's matchups aren't part of the additional simulcasts that were just announced.

Those additional simulcast games include: 

Oct. 2 -- Seattle Seahawks at New York Giants
Oct. 9 -- Green Bay Packers and Las Vegas Raiders
Oct. 16 -- Dallas Cowboys at Los Angeles Chargers
Oct. 23 -- San Francisco 49ers at Minnesota Vikings
Oct. 30 -- The Raiders at Detroit Lions
Nov. 6 -- Charters at New York Jets
Nov. 13 -- Denver Broncos at Buffalo bills.
Nov. 27 Chicago Bears at Vikings
Dec. 4 -- Cincinnati Bangals at Jacksonville Jaguars
Dec. 18 -- Kansas City Chiefs vs. New England Patriots

The move injects three-plus hours of premium, strike-proof live sports into ABC's primetime lineup at a moment when the network could certainly use the momentum. 

Last Monday (Sept. 11), Disney drew a record MNF average audience of 22.6 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN 2 and ABC for its season-opening matchup featuring quarterback Aaron Rodgers making its first but ultimately ill-fated start as a New York Jets. After three plays against the Buffalo Bills, Rodgers left on a cart, for good (or at least until next season).

The National Football League announced that Monday’s game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals — in which Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest — will not be completed.

Hamlin needed to have his heart restarted on the field and was rushed to the hospital. He is in critical condition but has “shown remarkable improvement over the past 24 hours,” the team said. He is holding hands with visitors and is able to write messages.

Hamlin had his breathing tube removed Friday and addressed his teammates via Facetime, according to the Buffalo Bills' Twitter account.

The game, a Monday Night Football telecast airing on ESPN and ABC, was suspended in the first quarter. Because it had implications for the NFL playoffs, the league was looking for ways to finish the game. But the league said it will not be finished and said a potential AFC Championship game between Buffalo and the Kansas City Chiefs might be played on a neutral site because the two teams will not have played the same number of games, throwing off the way the league normally determines home-field advantage during the playoffs.

The AFC Championship Game is historically one of the highest-rated broadcasts of the year.

If the Bills and Chiefs wind up meeting in a Wild Card game, home field will be determined by a coin toss. 

“This has been a very difficult week,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “We continue to focus on the recovery of Damar Hamlin and are encouraged by the improvements in his condition as well as the tremendous outpouring of support and care for Damar and his family from across the country. We are also incredibly appreciative of the amazing work of the medical personnel and commend each and every one of them.”

The decision not to play the conclusion of the game was reached by the league after talking with the teams and the NFL Players Association.

The league laid out three reasons for not playing the game:

• Not playing the Buffalo-Cincinnati game to its conclusion will have no effect on which clubs qualify for the postseason. No club would qualify for the postseason and no club will be eliminated based on the outcome of this game.
• It would require postponing the start of the playoffs for one week, thereby affecting all 14 clubs that qualify for postseason play.
• Making the decision prior to Week 18 is consistent with our competitive principles and enables all clubs to know the playoff possibilities prior to playing the final weekend of regular season games.

Among the key factors in arriving at this decision:

“Cancelling the game between the Bills and Bengals creates potential competitive inequities in certain playoff scenarios,” the league noted. “In an effort to mitigate those inequities, NFL clubs will consider tomorrow in a Special League Meeting a resolution recommended by the Commissioner and approved today by the Competition Committee, consisting of two elements: 

“The AFC Championship Game will be played at a neutral site if the participating teams played an unequal number of games and both could have been the number one seed and hosted the game had all AFC clubs played a full 17-game regular season. Those circumstances involve Buffalo or Cincinnati qualifying for the game as a road team.

“The second element comes into play If Baltimore defeats Cincinnati in Week 18 it will have defeated Cincinnati, a divisional opponent, twice but will not be able to host a playoff game because Cincinnati will have a higher winning percentage for a 16-game schedule than Baltimore will for a 17-game schedule. 

“If Baltimore defeats Cincinnati and if those two clubs are scheduled to play a Wild Card game against one another, the site for that game would be determined by a coin toss. If Cincinnati wins the Week 18 game or if Baltimore and Cincinnati are not scheduled to play one another in the Wild Card round, the game sites would be determined by the regular scheduling procedures,“ the NFL said.

“As we considered the football schedule, our principles have been to limit disruption across the league and minimize competitive inequities,” Goodell said.  “I recognize that there is no perfect solution. The proposal we are asking the ownership to consider, however, addresses the most significant potential equitable issues created by the difficult, but necessary, decision not to play the game under these extraordinary circumstances.” ■

The National Football League has said Monday night’s postponed Buffalo Bills-Cincinnati Bengals game will not be played this week as the league continues to monitor the health of Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who suffered a cardiac arrest during the first quarter.

In a Tuesday afternoon statement, the league said the Bills-Bengals game “would not be resumed this week” as it continues to be in “regular contact with the medical team caring for Hamlin" as well as the two teams and the NFL Players Association.

“The NFL has made no decision regarding the possible resumption of the game at a later date,” the league said in a statement.

The decision comes a day after the league suspended the Monday Night Football game, which aired on ESPN and ABC, in the first quarter, after Hamlin collapsed on the field following a tackle. Hamlin was given CPR on the field as players from both teams gathered around the fallen athlete. It was announced shortly afterwards that Hamlin had suffered cardiac arrest and his heartbeat was restored on the field.

The league said there will not be any changes to the Week 18 regular-season schedule, and it would provide additional information as it becomes available.

Hamlin’s family released a statement on Twitter thanking first responders and healthcare professionals at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center “who provide exceptional care to Damar.” ▪️

The Monday Night Football game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals was suspended during the first quarter after Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field following a tackle.

Hamlin fell over backwards and was reportedly given CPR. Players from both teams looked on — crying and praying — as he received medical attention. Hamlin was put in an ambulance and taken to a hospital.

The Buffalo Bills later said Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest and his heartbeat was restored on the field.

The injury occurred at about 8:59 p.m. ET.

Initially, both teams reportedly were given five minutes to warm up and resume the game. But after meeting with their players, the coaches decided to pull their teams from the field at least until the player’s condition could be ascertained.

At about 10 p.m. ET, the NFL decided that the game would not resume Monday night. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, in a statement, said that Hamlin was in “critical condition.” No time to resume play was determined. 

NFL games are rarely stopped. Some games were rescheduled because of player illness during the COVID pandemic. Games have also been suspended due to lightning and other weather conditions.

The game was being televised on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.

During the suspension, ESPN commentators were left discussing how the player’s health was everyone’s main concern and that no one cares about the game.

 “This went from a sports story to a news story, from a sporting event to a matter of life and death, just like that,” said ESPN announcer Joe Buck, interviewed on ESPN’s  SportsCenter by Scott Van Pelt after the game was postponed.

“We’ve been through a lot of situations in games where we’ve stood up here and you're watching medical personnel, make sure somebody's okay down on the field, you think they’re going through, a blow to the head or something along those lines, and it switched,” he said. “It switched quickly and it went from what is typical, everybody gathered around, let's make sure this player is OK,  to those who were on the field in his immediate vicinity administering CPR and really pounding on his chest and a lot of that was not on television.” 

“We were sitting here and I'm looking at Troy [Aikman, who broadcasts games with Buck on ESPN] and he's looking at me and it was like, oh my God, this is not what you expected to see. And now is he OK? And it went on and on and on and then that's when the players were gathered around so tight that it was hard to even see what was going on,” Buck said.

“So this took your breath away. I’m sick to my stomach. If you’re asking me how I feel, which nobody cares, but that’s what it feels like being here in this stadium tonight, witnessing what we saw right around midfield,” he said.

Player safety has been emerging as an important issue with the NFL, with key players being knocked out of games because of head injuries.

During the suspension ESPN aired commercials for advertisers including GE, Apple and Capital One. It later appeared the network shifted to showing promos and public service announcements. 

Here is the NFL's  statement on the situation:

Tonight’s Buffalo Bills-Cincinnati Bengals game has been postponed after Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin collapsed, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced.

Hamlin received immediate medical attention on the field by team and independent medical staff and local paramedics. He was then transported to a local hospital where he is in critical condition.

Our thoughts are with Damar and the Buffalo Bills. We will provide more information as it becomes available.

The NFL has been in constant communication with the NFL Players Association which is in agreement with postponing the game. ■

The College Football Playoff leads the list of live television sports events heading into the New Year.

ESPN will televise the New Year’s Eve Fiesta Bowl between third-ranked TCU and second-ranked Michigan, as well as the Peach Bowl pitting top-ranked Georgia against fourth-ranked Ohio State. The winners of both games will meet in the College Football Playoff Championship game January 9 on ABC.

Other college football bowl games airing on Saturday include the Music City Bowl (Iowa-Kentucky) on ABC, and the Sugar Bowl (Alabama-Kansas St.) on ESPN. On Monday, ESPN2 will air the ReliaQuest Bowl (Mississippi St-Illinois), ABC will telecast the Citrus Bowl (LSU-Purdue) and ESPN will air both the Cotton Bowl (Tulane-USC) and the Rose Bowl (Penn State-Utah).

The NFL enters its penultimate week of regular-season play Sunday with regional coverage on CBS and Fox, followed by NBC’s Sunday Night Football matchup between division rivals the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens.

On Monday night, ABC and ESPN will simulcast the Monday Night Football game between the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals. 

The Premier League returns after a break due the World Cup with nine live soccer game telecasts over the three-day weekend across USA, NBC and streaming service Peacock. On the NHL ice, ESPN on Sunday will air the New York Islanders-Seattle Kraken, while TNT on Monday will televise the Pittsburgh Penguins-Boston Bruins contest. ■ 

ESPN ended the Christmas week on a high note with a primetime ratings win.

The network rode a combination of its college football bowl game coverage, its December 19 Monday Night Football telecast and its Christmas Day NBA telecasts to average 2.4 million primetime viewers for the week of December 19 to December 25 to lead all cable networks for a second straight week, according to Nielsen.

NFL Network, on the strength of its Las Vegas Raiders-Pittsburgh Steelers NFL telecast on Christmas Eve, finished second with 1.6 million viewers.

Fox News Channel finished third for the week with 1.5 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers and Hallmark Channel’s 1.1 million watchers.

Rounding out the top 10 most-watched networks for the week were Freeform (876,000 viewers), TBS Network (805,000), HGTV (742,000) USA Network (740,000) and AMC (735,000).

Fox News made it 51 straight weekly wins on the total day chart, averaging 1.1 million viewers for the period. ESPN finished second with 866,000 viewers, followed by MSNBC (830,000), Hallmark Channel (723,000) and CNN (514,000), Nielsen said. ■ 

It started out as a routine post-Monday Night Football interview for ESPN, with play-by-play duo Joe Buck and Troy Aikman discussing the Los Angeles Chargers' playoff chances after their 20-3 win over the Indianapolis Colts with SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt. 

But boy, did it get cringy. 

Van Pelt addressed the first question to Buck, but focused the rest of the five-minute day-after-Christmas inquiry on the announcer's Hall-of-Fame quarterback booth mate, Troy Aikman. 

The embedded YouTube video picks up towards the end of the segment, when Van Pelt tries to smoothly segue on. Buck suddenly raises a sharp elbow about just having to "awkwardly stand there" as Van Pelt directed most of the questions to Aikman.

A somewhat tense back-and-forth ensues, despite Aikman's comical attempt to make peace, with Van Pelt specifically targeting Buck's $15 million-a-year salary. 

Warning: This milk is as sour as we have described it:

NFL football telecasts helped land both ESPN and the NFL Network among the top three most watched cable networks in primetime last week.

ESPN averaged 2 million viewers in primetime during the week of December 12 to December 18 to top all networks, according to Nielsen. The network was fueled by the 10 million viewers who tuned into its December 12 New England Patriots-Arizona Cardinals Monday Night Football telecast.

NFL Network, which offered three NFL games on December 17 — including a primetime matchup between the Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills that drew more than 11 million viewers — finished third for the week with an average of 1.7 million viewers. 

Fox News, which tied ESPN for first place last week, finished in second place with 1.9 million viewers, with Hallmark Channel pulling into fourth place with 1.1 million viewers and MSNBC finishing fifth with 1 million watchers.

Paramount Network was sixth with 963,000 viewers, followed by TLC (876,000 viewers), History (738,000), HGTV (729,000), and Food Network (672,000).

Fox News topped the total day chart for the 50th consecutive week with an average of 1.3 million viewers, easily beating ESPN (800,000 viewers), NFL Network (752,000), Hallmark Channel (715,000), and MSNBC (700,000), according to Nielsen.■  

Fox News and ESPN tied for first on last week’s primetime chart during the first full week of December.

Fox News and ESPN each averaged 2.1 million viewers during the week of December 5 to December 11, according to Nielsen. ESPN was paced by its December 5 Tampa Bay Buccaneers-New Orleans Saints Monday Night Football telecast, which averaged more than 11 million viewers, while Fox News benefited from its coverage of the December 6 Georgia Senate runoff election.

MSNBC finished in third place with 1.4 million viewers, while Hallmark Channel pulled into fourth with 1.3 million viewers and Paramount Network finished fifth with 866,000 viewers. 

HGTV was sixth with 750,000 viewers, followed by History (739,000), TLC (738,000), CNN (701,000) and INSP (671,000), said the network. 

Fox News easily topped the total day charts with 1.4 million viewers for its 49th straight weekly win. MSNBC (842,000 viewers), Hallmark Channel (746,000), ESPN (712,000) and CNN (551,000) rounded out the top five most-watched networks on a 24-hour basis, reported Nielsen. ■  

ESPN and Fox News battled to a weekly cable primetime tie during the last week in September.

ESPN, helped by the more than 7 million viewers who tuned into its Sept. 26 Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants Monday Night Football game, and Fox News – buoyed by its coverage of powerful Hurricane Ian’s landfall early last week in Florida – each averaged 2.1 million viewers during the week of Sept. 26 to Oct. 2, according to Nielsen.

MSNBC pulled into third place with 1.1 million viewers followed by HGTV’s 809,000 viewers, CNN’s 770,000 viewers and TLC’s 748,000 watchers. Hurricane Ian coverage also bolstered The Weather Channel, which finished seventh with 700,000 viewers, followed by Hallmark Channel (698,000), INSP (664,000) and TBS (580,000), said network officials.

Fox News averaged 1.4 million viewers on a 24-hour basis to top all cable networks for the 39th straight week, followed by ESPN (815,000 viewers), MSNBC (779,000) CNN (670,000) and The Weather Channel (662,000), said Nielsen. ■  

In addition to delivering a record-breaking audience, ESPN’s Week 1 Monday Night Football broadcast gave advertisers engaged viewers who searched for their brands and products.

EDO, a research firm that Disney Advertising Sales works with, determined that for retail advertisers, one commercial on this week’s Monday Night Football delivered the same impact as 35 spots across prime time programming on other broadcast and cable outlets.

Overall, MNF viewers were 68% more likely to search for advertised brands and products that viewers on other broadcast and cable programming.

During week one, MNF viewers were also 7% more likely to search for advertised brands than viewers of the opening night game last Thursday on NBC.

Also: Week 1 NFL Ad Spending Up 8% to $250 Million, EDO Finds

“Advertising drives the economics for live sports on TV for a simple reason: sports attract the biggest and most engaged audiences,” said Kevin Krim, president & CEO of EDO. “Specifically, EDO has found that NFL programming delivers the strongest environments for advertisers on TV every year, guaranteeing a consistently strong baseline of engagement for brands across categories.”

MNF viewers were 92% more likely to search for brands and products featured in automotive, banking & finance, and insurance spots than viewers of other broadcast and cable prime time programming. 

For entertainment categories like movies, restaurants and telecom, viewers were 190% more likely on average to search for brands  and products advertised during MNF on ESPN compared to ads during broadcast and cable primetime programs.

“We always talk about the power of Disney, but this data demonstrates just how impactful our programming is for brands,” said Danielle Brown, senior VP, Disney Advertising data enablement & category strategy. “In just the first week of Monday Night Football on Disney networks engagement from viewers has exceeded expectations and proved that we are the ideal place for all advertising categories.” 

Some of this season’s key MNF advertisers include Progressive, which presents Monday Night Kickoff; Allstate, the halftime sponsor; Subway, which presents Monday Night Countdown and Snickers, sponsors Sunday NFL Countdown and the postseason NFL Countdown. ■

ESPN Plus is ready to break the huddle with a lineup of NFL games it will stream this season, including the first game it will have exclusively.

On Sunday, October 30, ESPN Plus will be the exclusive national telecast when the Denver Broncos and the Jacksonville Jaguars play in London’s Wembley Stadium.

ESPN Plus will simulcast five Monday Night Football games, two Saturday games during the league’s Week 18 and the Wild Card Monday playoff game.

This is the first year that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will call games for ESPN after 20 years at Fox. 

Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli — also known as the Manningcast — will stream live on ESPN Plus in weeks 1, 3 and 15, as well as the Wild Card Monday playoff game.

ESPN Plus also will be streaming studio shows including NFL PrimeTime, NFL Matchup and NFL Turning Point. ■

ESPN officially announced that it signed sportscasters Joe Buck and Troy Aikman for Monday Night Football.

Aikman and Buck have worked as a team on NFL broadcasts for 20 years, all of them for Fox Sports, and have called six Super Bowls. ESPN and ABC will be airing the Super Bowl in 2027 and 2031.

Buck and Aikman will also contribute content to ESPN Plus. 

Steve Levy, Brian Griese and Louis Riddick were in the booth for Monday Night Football last season. Sideline reporter Lisa Salters will return as sideline reporter and John Parry will again be the officiating analyst.

On 10 Monday nights per season, ESPN2 will air the “Manningcast,” featuring former QBs Peyton and Eli Manning covering the game with guests, which proved a popular alternative for many MNF viewers. 

There had been reports that Aikman and Buck might move to Amazon Prime Video, which will have Thursday Night Football next season, but more recent stories said the duo was expected to land at ESPN.

Also: Tradition-Bound Baseball is Streaming Into the Future

“When you have the opportunity to bring in the iconic, longest-running NFL broadcasting duo, you take it, especially at a time when we are on the cusp of a new era in our expanding relationship with the NFL,” said Jimmy Pitaro, chairman, ESPN and Sports Content.  “The NFL continues to ascend, and we now have more games than ever before, providing additional opportunities for Joe, Troy and our deep roster of commentators.”

Aikman, a Hall of Fame quarterback, retired from the NFL after the 2000 season and went to work for Fox Sports the following season. 

“The opportunity to be a voice on Monday Night Football, adding to its legacy and being a part of the future of the NFL on ESPN, has me motivated and reflective,“ Aikman said. ”As a kid in California, the voices of Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell, and my mom’s personal favorite, Don Meredith, echoed throughout our living room each week. Joe and I are humbled to be part of that same tradition that has existed for more than 50 years across generations of football fans.  I am looking forward to the next several years with ESPN and all our new teammates.”

Also: ESPN Re-Signs Doris Burke to Multi-Year Extension

Buck is the son of legendary sportscaster Jack Buck and has been broadcasting NFL games since he was 25 years old during the 1994 season. 

“Everything about Monday Night Football, including the broadcast, set the standard for the modern NFL experience,“ Buck said. ”My earliest memories of walking around football stadiums are tagging along with my dad as he called Monday Night Football on radio. To return to the stadium on Monday nights with Troy — who I have the utmost comfort with and confidence in — and begin a new chapter, for us and ESPN, has me excited about this season and our future.” ■

. 

ESPN and The Walt Disney Co. said they reached an expanded agreement with Peyton Manning and his Omaha Productions.

The new deal adds a fourth 10-game season of Monday Night Football with Peyton & Eli, which appeared opposite Monday Night Football on ESPN2.

Omaha Productions will also work with ESPN to produce alternative presentations for UFC, college football and golf. The Mannings will not host those shows.

“We couldn’t be more proud of Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli and the partnership we’ve developed with Peyton, Eli and the team at Omaha Productions,” said ESPN and sports content chairman Jimmy Pitaro. “This new agreement allows us to deepen our relationship and explore original concepts to spread that magic to other sports and events. Ultimately, this will help grow our audience by providing fans with even more creative options that they crave.”

This season’s nine episodes of Peyton and Eli averaged 1.6 million viewers.

“I’ve always loved talking football with my brother, and it was even more fun to do it while watching ESPN’s Monday Night Football. Eli and I are excited to sign on for another season, and the entire Omaha team is looking forward to producing MegaCasts that celebrate other sports,” Peyton Manning said. ■

Sports networks dominated the top two slots on the cable primetime charts during the last full week of 2021.

NFL Network, on the strength of the 7.8 million viewers who tuned into its Dec. 23 San Francisco 49’ers-Tennessee Titans NFL Thursday Night Football game, finished in first place during the week of December 20-December 26 with an average of 3 million viewers, according to Nielsen. 

ESPN, led by its Dec. 20 Minnesota Vikings-Chicago Bears Monday Night Football game, finished second for the week with 2.2 million viewers, followed by Fox News with 1.8 million watchers. 

Hallmark Channel wrapped up its holiday movies schedule in fourth place with 1.2 million viewers, followed by TBS with 1.1 million viewers. Freeform, MSNBC and Paramount Network finished tied for sixth with 1 million viewers, followed by HGTV (982,000 viewers) and TLC (818,000).

Fox News averaged 1.3 million viewers on a 24-hour basis, finishing 2021 on an impressive 45-week winning streak on the total day charts. Hallmark Channel (869,000 viewers), ESPN (838,000), NFL Network (826,000) and Freeform (616,000) rounded out the top five most-watched networks in the chart, reported Nielsen. ■       

ESPN said it will close out its coverage of the National Football League’s regular season with the premiere of Monday Night Football: Doubleheader Saturday on Jan. 8.

The games will be simulcast on ABC and streamed on ESPN Plus.

The new doubleheader was one of the results of the new rights deal The Walt Disney Co. signed with the NFL in March. It will be part of the league’s Week 18 — a longer season in which each team plays 17 games, up from 16 previously.

Also: Double Double Headers Part of NFL Plan To Boost Viewership

The teams to play in the doubleheader will be announced after Week 17 is played, but ESPN said both matchups will have playoff implications.

ESPN will also be televising a playoff game during the league’s Super Wild Card weekend. That game will have a mega-cast format, including a Maningcast featuring Peyton and Eli Manning,

Announcers Steve Levy, Brian Griese, Louis Riddick, Lisa Salters and John Parry will call one game. That group will be concluding their second regular season on Monday Night Football. They will also call ESPN’s Super Wild Card game. 

ESPN’s top college football announcing team, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit, will call the other game. The pair previously worked an NFL game last September when the Steelers played the Giants. Laura Rutledge, host of NFL LIve, will be the on-field reporter for that game.

ABC and ESPN Plus will also be simulcasting ESPN’s MNF game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears on Dec. 20. ■

ESPN took sole possession of first place in the primetime ratings race last week after sharing the title with Fox News Channel for the past two weeks, according to Nielsen.

ESPN — fueled by the 12.1 million viewers who watched its Nov. 8 Chicago Bears-Pittsburgh Steelers Monday Night Football telecast — averaged 3 million viewers for the week of Nov. 8-14 in primetime, distancing itself from second place Fox News, which averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

Hallmark Channel rode its original holiday-themed movies to a third-place finish with 1.4 million viewers, followed by MSNBC with 1.1 million watchers.

TLC was fifth with 865,000 viewers, followed by TBS (848,000 viewers), Paramount Network (828,000), HGTV (825,000), INSP (762,000) and Food Network (716,000.)

Fox News was the most watched network on a total-day basis for the 39th consecutive week, followed by ESPN (983,000 viewers), Hallmark Channel (804,000), MSNBC (682,000) and HGTV (514,000), said Nielsen. ■ 

Live sports programming continued to influence the primetime ratings charts as baseball-infused TBS and football-driven ESPN came out on top for the second week in a row.

TBS finished first among all cable networks during the week of Oct. 18 to Oct. 24, averaging 3.1 million viewers on the strength of its coverage of baseball’s National League Championship Series. TBS’ Oct. 23 Los Angeles Dodgers-Atlanta Braves Game 6 telecast averaged nearly 7 million viewers, according to Nielsen. 

ESPN finished second for the week with 3 million viewers, led by its Oct. 18 Buffalo Bills-Tennessee Titans Monday Night Football telecast, which drew 12.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

National sports network FS1 pulled up to fourth place on the primetime charts after drawing 5.8 million viewers for its coverage of Game 6 of the Boston Red Sox-Houston Astros American League Championship Series on Oct. 22, said Nielsen.

Fox News finished third for the week with 2.3 million viewers, with MSNBC finishing fifth with 1.2 million viewers.

Hallmark Channel (1.1 million viewers), TNT (926,000), HGTV (887,000), TLC (786,000) and INSP (748,000) rounded out the top 10 most watched networks for the week.

Fox News continued its impressive run atop the total day charts, winning for the 36th consecutive week. ESPN (960,000 viewers), TBS (831,000), MSNBC (696,000) and the Hallmark Channel (605,000) finished behind the Fox News, according to Nielsen. 

TBS hit a primetime ratings home run last week, backed by its Major League Baseball playoffs coverage.

TBS averaged 3.1 million viewers during the week of Oct. 11 to Oct. 17 to top all cable networks, according to Nielsen. The network was led by its baseball post-season coverage, led by its Oct. 14 Game 5 Los Angeles Dodgers-San Francisco Giants National League Division Series telecast, which drew 6.5 million viewers, said Nielsen. 

ESPN continued its strong Fall ratings run, finishing second in primetime with 2.6 million viewers on the strength of the more than 11 million viewers who tuned into its Oct. 11 Baltimore Ravens-Los Angeles Chargers Monday Night Football telecast. 

Fox News finished third with 2.3 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers and HGTV’s 924,000 watchers. Rounding out the top 10 most watched cable networks in primetime were TLC (792,000 viewers), INSP (753,000), Hallmark Channel (713,000), Fox Sports 1 (703,000) and CNN (661,000).

On the total day front, Fox News extended its winning streak to 34 weeks, averaging 1.3 million viewers. TBS finished second with 930,000 viewers, followed by ESPN (897,000 viewers), MSNBC (676,000) and HGTV (537,000), said Nielsen.

ESPN scored a second straight primetime ratings win last week while Fox News Channel continued its long winning streak in total day, according to Nielsen.

ESPN — bolstered by the 12.9 million viewers generated by the network’s Sept. 27 Philadelphia Eagles-Dallas Cowboys Monday Night Football telecast — averaged 2.8 million viewers in primetime during the week of Sept. 27 to Oct. 3 to best all cable networks, said Nielsen.

Fox News finished second with 2.3 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers and NFL Network’s 1.1 million watchers. HGTV pulled into fifth place with 974,000 viewers, followed by TLC (838,000 viewers), INSP (824,000), Hallmark Channel (755,000), TBS (730,000) and Discovery Channel (718,000).

Fox News posted its 32nd consecutive win on the total day chart, averaging 1.1 million viewers to beat out ESPN (687,000 viewers), MSNBC (594,000), HGTV (472,000), and CNN (416,000), according to Nielsen. 

ESPN dethroned Fox News Channel at the top of last week’s primetime ratings chart, but the news network continued its domination on a 24-hour basis, according to Nielsen.

ESPN averaged 2.7 million viewers during the week of Sept. 20-26 to lead all cable networks and end Fox News’s hold on the top spot at 11 weeks, reported Nielsen. ESPN was led by its Sept. 20 Green Bay Packers-Detroit Lions Monday Night Football telecast, which drew more than 13 million viewers. 

Fox News finished second with 2.4 million viewers, followed by MSNBC with 1.3 million viewers. NFL Network moved into fourth place with 1.1 million viewers, followed by HGTV’s 957,000 watchers. TLC (847,000 viewers), Discovery Channel (789,000), CNN (776,000), Hallmark Channel (775,000) and INSP (729,000) rounded out the top 10 most-watched cable networks in primetime.

Fox News rolled over the competition on the total-day charts, averaging 1.4 million viewers to finish first for the 31st consecutive week. ESPN (839,000 viewers), MSNBC (731,000), HGTV (581,000) and CNN (549,000) followed behind Fox News, said Nielsen. 

Former Super Bowl quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning will be on Monday Night Football for the next three seasons, sort of.

The Mannings will be the lead attraction during alternate broadcasts of MNF as part of a new megacast on ESPN2 and potentially ESPN Plus.

They will add their commentary from a remote location, away from the studio. They will be joined by celebrities and current and former players.

The telecasts will be produced by Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning’s company.

Also Read: NFL Network To Show Record 23 Live Pre-Season Games

ESPN has been seeking Peyton Manning to add some star power to its Monday Night Football booth. Getting him for an alternate broadcast could still be called a win for the Disney-owned sports giant.

“Offering multiple Monday Night Football viewing options for the next three seasons continues our innovation efforts and provides additional value for our fans,” said Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of ESPN and sports content. “Peyton and Eli will bring a different approach, delving into conversation about broader, big-picture topics while also honing in on the game, much like fans do when watching with their family and friends.” 

The Mannings' MegaCast broadcast will debut the first three weeks of 2021 MNF slate featuring Baltimore at Las Vegas, Detroit at Green Bay, and Philadelphia at Dallas.

Manning has been doing Peyton’s Places for ESPN Plus. Omaha Productions is also adding five new shows for ESPN: Abby’s Places, with Abby Wambach, Eli’s Places with Eli Manning, Papi’s Places with David Ortiz, Rowdy’s Places with Ronda Rousey and Vince’s Places with Vince Carter.

“This partnership with ESPN and The Walt Disney Company reflects an ongoing, shared commitment to offering fans fun, innovative content,” said Manning. “ESPN Plus has been a terrific partner for Omaha Productions as we built out The Places franchise and we’re excited to co-create a new MegaCast format that will have something for everyone.”

Steve Levy, Brian Griese, Louis Riddick, Lisa Salters and John Parry return for their second consecutive season as a broadcast group and will be on the traditional call of Monday Night Football on ESPN.

The jury is still out as to how broadcasters and cable sports programmers expect to pay for the landmark 10-year, $95 billion deal for National Football League rights, but many distributors are bracing for big increases in retransmission consent and affiliate fees to pay at least some of the freight.

The NFL deal spreads rights payments over 10 years for CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC Sunday regular-season and playoff games and ESPN for Monday Night Football. Amazon Prime Video stepped up for Thursday Night Football contests, agreeing to pony up about $1 billion annually for exclusive rights for the games, which shouldn’t have an impact on pay TV. 

The new deal doesn’t take effect until 2023, meaning that operators will have at least a two-year reprieve until the next retrans cycle. While some analysts have said recent retrans negotiations likely took an increase in NFL rights costs into account, they probably didn’t anticipate a doubling of the fees programmers paid — and virtually were forced into paying.

“[A]s more premium content is shifted to DTC platforms, as ViacomCBS and NBCU have shown with their new NFL contracts, the industry runs
the risk of both higher cord-cutting and greater viewer erosion,” Moffett­Nathanson media analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in a note to clients. “In particular, those programmers — again ViacomCBS and NBCU — who appear to abandon their linear programming obligations by rapidly shifting premium content over to their DTC platforms run the risk of getting dropped by MVPDs and/or suffering lower annual price escalators, especially as it relates to growth in retrans.”

Also Read: Big Four Are Sports TV's Comeback Kids

For the most part, cable operators are anticipating a big jump in retrans costs in the next couple of years. Those that have finalized pacts in the past year shouldn’t feel the pain of any NFL-related increases immediately. But since retrans deals are usually three to five years in length (and the NFL rights deals go through 2033), they will feel the pain eventually.

Distributors that will probably have to face a retrans negotiation this year include Dish Network, Cox Communications, AT&T’s DirecTV and U-verse TV units and Altice USA, according to Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Dish deals for 113 Sinclair Broadcast Group stations in 83 markets and for 61 Tegna stations in 51 markets come up for renewal this year, according to Kagan, as do Cox’s agreements for 33 Nexstar Media Group stations in 23 markets and 17 Sinclair stations in 12 markets. AT&T will have to negotiate for 28 Fox stations in 18 markets and Altice USA will start talks regarding 13 Fox stations in eight markets before the end of the year.   However those deals turn out, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) are bracing for increases that they, in turn, would like to pass onto consumers. (See chart.)

Most of the top operators have increased their monthly broadcast surcharges to cover retrans increases, including Comcast, which boosted its surcharge by $4.50 per month per subscriber in January to $19.45, and Charter, which hiked its monthly surcharge by $2.95, to $16.45 per month, earlier this year. The figures are averages, and actual surcharges vary by market.  

“I think this leads to even more unsustainable price increases being demanded of pay TV providers and their customers,” Mediacom Communications senior VP of government and public relations Tom Larsen said. “That’s not a good scenario for the pay TV business long term.”

Some of those fee increases could be demanded by networks and stations that have been less active on the retrans front in the past. The new deal brings The Walt Disney Co.’s ABC back into the NFL fold for the first time since 2006, with rights to the Super Bowl in 2026 and in 2030, as well as three Monday Night Football games — in a doubleheader with ESPN — per year. In a research note, Barclays Group media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar noted that ABC has a significant retrans revenue gap of between $200 million and $600 million annually, compared to its broadcast peers, that should narrow with the NFL’s return.

“With Peacock, Paramount Plus, ESPN Plus and Amazon carrying NFL games, most football games will now be available on some streaming service, which is inevitably likely to result in the pace of cord-cutting accelerating significantly once the new deal fully kicks in and if Disney chooses to make football available on ESPN Plus,” Venkateshwar wrote.

Cable, satellite and telco TV operators will likely foot most of the $95 billion bill over the 10-year period of the deal through higher fees, ACA Connects CEO Matt Polka said in a statement. 

“Broadcast networks and TV station owners like Sinclair, Nexstar, Tegna and Apollo Global Management will continue to leverage the broken retransmission-consent rules to demand excessive fees from smaller cable operators, driving up the cost to watch what broadcasters like to call ‘free TV,’ ” Polka said. “In order to make up for their massive NFL obligations, broadcasters will hike their prices even higher — and, ironically, use blackouts of NFL games themselves in order to do so.” 

While operators are reluctant to predict what impact NFL rights will have on retrans negotiations going forward, they are resigned to the reality that fees during the next cycle will be substantially higher. Whether or not they agree to pay them is another thing.

Could Push MVPDs to Breaking Point

In a research note, Nathanson said making programming as valuable as NFL football available both on broadcast and direct-to-consumer streaming services could be the last straw for MVPDs that have complained in the past about having to pay for networks that were available elsewhere for free or at a lower price. 

By making games available simultaneously on both linear and streaming platforms, Nathanson noted, programmers are risking “the possibility that distributors start to punish programmers who move their key content to their owned DTC platforms. As
such, distributors may choose to entirely drop network offerings or decide to rein in their intended annual pricing escalators. Thus, a combination of rising cord-cutting and falling pricing power would crush media earnings.”

According to a distributor that asked not to be named, the streaming aspect of the deal could make dropping a broadcaster a more thinkable option, despite the pushback by consumers.  

“It’s something that all providers, if they aren’t already thinking about it, they need to be thinking about it,” the distributor said.  

Most operators were reluctant to be specific as to what impact the NFL contract will have on retrans fees because the new rights deal won’t kick in for another two years. Still, they don’t appear overly optimistic about the future.

“We remain concerned about the rising costs of sports content and the impact it has on consumers’ access to affordable video services,” Cox executive director, media relations Todd Smith said.

Nathanson observed that the new NFL deal appears to be focused on the league getting a bigger share of the retransmission consent fees that stations are paid by MVPDs. 

“If prior deals were about extracting maximum value for ESPN, these deals were about reclaiming the billions of dollars of retrans payments that the broadcast industry has collected from distributors,” Nathanson wrote. During the last NFL rights negotiation, ESPN affiliate fees were 10 times higher than the retrans revenue of the average broadcast network. Now the ratio is about 5 to 1. 

“With the current rise of cord-cutting and the acceleration in broadcast retrans revenues, we estimate that this gap will narrow even further over the course of the next deal,” Nathanson wrote, putting what MVPDs pay to stations even closer to what they pay ESPN.  

The streaming implications of the new NFL arrangements could be the real wild card. According to reports, CBS, Fox and NBC have the right to simultaneously stream the games with their respective broadcast network, a right CBS held in prior deals with its CBS All Access (now Paramount Plus) service. 

Will Streaming Ties Bind to Pay TV?

Some of the broadcast streaming services are expected to require viewers to have either a higher-tier subscription or a pay TV package that can be authenticated by the streaming service in order to access games. Those dynamics aren’t abundantly clear at the moment, though. According to some reports, subscribers to Paramount Plus’s lowest tier — priced at $4.99 per month — will get access to NFL games.  

Kagan senior research analyst Justin Nielson said if streaming customers are essentially getting the games as part of their regular or even free packages, that could diminish the value of the NFL rights in the eyes of distributors. 

“The exclusivity of the Sunday broadcast games for stations is diminished if it is also available for streaming,” Nielson said. “It will be interesting to see if the major TV-
station owners push back on increases in reverse retrans payments to the networks as traditional multichannel subs decline as more viewers move to streaming.”

LightShed Partners partner and senior analyst Rich Greenfield, who has long predicted the end of the traditional cable bundle, said in a note to clients that the NFL deal could be the final nail in linear TV’s coffin. But it also could spell the ultimate demise of retrans, he added. 

“With more and more NFL content available outside the bundle, the legacy multichannel bundle will evaporate even faster than expected (cord-
cutting) and the ultimate subscriber floor will be lower than anyone thought possible before,” Greenfield wrote.

While Fox doesn’t have a direct-­to-consumer streaming service yet, Greenfield added that the new NFL deal could provide the catalyst to launch a subscription tier of its Tubi streaming service that includes the NFL games. 

Loss of Leverage 

As more and more viewers migrate to streaming, that should materially affect station leverage over distributors, Greenfield continued. 

“In turn, retrans should stop growing and eventually start to decline, especially when you layer in that all the most compelling general entertainment TV programming is now flowing to direct-to-consumer streaming platforms vs. the legacy multichannel bundle,” he wrote. 

While streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video and ESPN Plus made the most noise from the just-inked National Football League and National Hockey League television rights deals, broadcast networks also scored valuable live content under the long-term pacts. 

The Big Four broadcasters — ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, considered long
past their prime as major live-sports distributors — retained their status as the pre-eminent outlets for NFL regular season and playoff games, including the Super Bowl. And ABC leveraged its corporate Disney connection to ESPN to add Monday Night Football doubleheaders and a pair of Super Bowls, as well as four Stanley Cup Finals over its seven-year deal with the NHL. 

Amazon in Primetime

Amazon Prime Video garnered headlines when it snagged the Thursday Night Football package away from Fox starting in 2023 as part of the new 11-year NFL TV deal, which also ends the simulcasts on NFL Network. Fox and CBS will continue to offer the lion’s share of regular-season Sunday afternoon NFL games and NBC will keep TV’s most-watched series, Sunday Night Football. ABC will join the three networks in rotating the Super Bowl telecasts — typically the most-watched TV program of the year — through 2031.

CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said that the broadcast network remains the key component of its NFL distribution strategy even as the network’s telecasts will also be simulcast on Paramount Plus. “The NFL will really be a driver of value and a driver of audience on our linear networks, on our digital networks and our streaming networks,” McManus said in a keynote speech at the NATPE Virtual Business of Live Sports TV conference March 23. 

Along with two Super Bowl telecasts, ABC also picks up three annual Monday Night Football telecasts as well as two late-season Saturday afternoon simulcast games with ESPN. ABC is a major component of ESPN’s overall NFL television strategy, NFL Media executive VP and chief operating officer Hans Schroeder said during ESPN’s March 18 conference call on the NFL deal. “When you think about … ABC coming back into the partnership for a number of exclusive games and also playoffs and Super Bowl, you think about the opportunities to leverage the different traditional channels and outlets ESPN and the Disney family have,” Schroeder said.

ABC also skated away with additional live sports content from Disney’s new TV deal with the NHL. ABC will have exclusive coverage of the Stanley Cup Finals for four years of the overall seven-year agreement. The broadcast network will also share 25 exclusive, national regular-season games with ESPN, as well as live exclusive coverage of one Conference Finals series and half of all first-round and second-
round games from the Stanley Cup Playoffs. 

The NHL, now in the final year of an exclusive U.S. arrangement with NBC Sports Group, is still seeking a second TV partner. 

ABC Back on the Grid

With broadcast networks and their affiliated stations looking for high-profile content to lead into its advertiser-attractive local news segments, sports analyst Lee Berke said ABC’s addition of the Super Bowl and Stanley Cup telecasts — as well as NFL Monday Night Football games and NHL regular and postseason games — will pay dividends for the broadcast network well into the decade. 

“ABC up to this point has been a laggard in offering sports to drive viewers to local news — all they really had was the NBA and college football — as the bulk of their sports programming moved over to ESPN,” he said. “Now, along with SEC college football, they will have the Stanley Cup finals every other year, Monday Night Football and placement in the Super Bowl rotation to go along with the NBA Finals. 

“When put in context, you’re now looking at 60 to 80 marquee sports events a year on ABC,” he said. “They have really bulked up.” 

The Super Bowl might be returning to ABC as part of a new deal between the National Football League and The Walt Disney Co., according to a published report.

Sports Business Journal reported that Disney is close to a deal with the NFL that would increase rights fees by 30% to about $2.6 billion. That agreement would include the renewal of Monday Night Football on Disney’s ESPN, plus returning Disney’s ABC to the Super Bowl rotation, which it left in 2006. 

ESPN also would get rights to use video clips in its studio shows.

The NFL called the report "incorrect." ESPN declined to comment.

The Super Bowl annually is the most-watched broadcast of the year with commercial prices exceeding $5.5 million for 30 seconds. During the regular season, ad revenue for NFL game broadcasts rose 5% to $2.68 billion, according to Standard Media Index.

The NFL Is in the process of negotiating a new round of rights deals. Most of its current broadcast deals end with the 2022 season.

The current broadcast partners for Sunday games are expected to remain the same, although their rights feels are expected to increase sharply. Disney already paid much more than Comcast’s NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS’s CBS Sports and Fox Sports for their game packages.

Having CBS’s NFL games is a big selling point for the premium version of ViacomCBS’s new streaming service Paramount Plus.

The big change in the game packages is that Fox is not expected to retain Thursday night football, which will be carried by the NFL Network and Amazon, which have been simulcasting the game, according to the report.

ABC and Fox were tied in Monday ratings, with ABC just ahead in share. With football on ABC in prime and leading into Fox’s prime, both had a 1.2 rating in viewers 18-49, per the Nielsen overnights. ABC had a 7 share and Fox a 6. 

The NFL pre-game got a 0.8 on ABC and Bills-Niners, on both ESPN and ABC, got a 1.3 on the broadcast net.

With a rare football lead-in on a Monday (Washington-Pittsburgh with a shocking result), I Can See Your Voice got a 2.0 on Fox, double what it did last time out, and led into a Cosmos: Possible Worlds rerun. 

NBC got a 0.6/4 and CBS a 0.5/3. NBC had The Voice at 0.8 across two hours, mostly flat with last week’s 0.9 and 0.8, and the premiere of Nurses at 0.4. 

On CBS, The Neighborhood got a 0.7 and Bob Hearts Abishola a 0.6, both level with last week. All Rise lost 20% for a 0.4 and a Bull rerun closed out prime. 

Univision scored a 0.4/2 and Telemundo a 0.3/2. Univision had Vencer El Desamor at 0.5 and Imperios de Mentiras and Dulce Ambicion at 0.3s. Vencer and Dulce were flat and Imperios lost a tenth. 

Telemundo had El Domo del Dinero at 0.2 and Todo Por Mi Hija at 0.4, the pair flat. Falsa Identidad lost 33% for a 0.2

The CW rated a 0.1/1 with repeats.   

There has never been a year like 2020 and there’s never been an upfront like 2020’s.

At this point they’re not saying it out loud, but buyers and sellers say the 2020-21 upfront auction of ad sales has concluded, just in time for the start of the fall season. Network executives said it wasn’t as bad as it could have been and professed to be pleased about how resilient the TV advertising market was during a pandemic. 

“We got all the deals done. Most of them came in very late,” said one network advertising sales executive. “It’s been a long process, but it ended well for us.”

This optimism is hard to quantify, and comparisons to previous years are difficult to make, because of big changes in the market. Ratings this year include out-of-home viewing and the networks were selling tons of new digital inventory, which makes past pricing and volume numbers irrelevant.

“The numbers are very muddy this year, not just because of out-of-home but because the digital side of the business has expanded a lot,” said a sales executive who, like several individuals quoted in this story, asked not to be identified by name because of company policies against commenting on contract negotiations.

Of course, even in a “normal” year, the smoke-and-mirrors numbers that surface after the upfront aren’t predictive of what media companies will report as advertising revenue when their earnings reports come out.

All Sides Sought Flexibility

“The big push and pull was around flexibility, and of course price,” an agency media buyer said. “Agencies wanted much greater flexibility. The networks came back and said, ‘What’s the point of upfront then?’ So I think there were definitely some concessions on flexibilities overall, but not as much as requested.”

“To get the market moving, the networks needed to incent our client to put budgets together with all the uncertainty they were facing,” another agency buyer said. Options moved from 60 days to 45 days. Some upfront buys moved from 25% cancelable to 50%. And while fourth-quarter orders were firmed up, some clients have until October to lock in exactly what they’re paying for during Q1 through Q3. 

“There was definitely pressure to make TV more digital in terms of flexibility and option terms,” A+E Networks president, ad sales Peter Olsen said. “There was a blending of digital terms and TV terms.” 

The bottom line, according to people engaged in the market, is that volume in the upfront finished down about 10% to 15% for linear TV, while prices on a cost-per-thousand viewers (CPM) basis again managed to increase, disappointing some buyers and clients. Last year, $23.9 billion was spent in the upfront auction of ad sales, including $10.2 billion on broadcast ads and $11.7 billion on cable, according to Media Dynamics.

”It was probably the equivalent of a low- to mid-singles market, which is not disastrous in an economy like this,” A+E’s Olsen said.

“In all of our key categories, in entertainment, and sports and news, we’ve achieved, depending on the client, low to mid single-digit price increases across the board,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch boasted at the Bank of America investor conference earlier this month. “That’s a tremendous result.”

Deals were made much later in the process — closer to Labor Day than to the Fourth of July, when media buyers start to begin their summer vacations because the upfront is wrapped up. One big reason for the delay was buyers waiting to see if sports, particularly NFL football, would be played. One network finished a deal on Sept. 18, just two weeks before the commercials are scheduled to air. Details are still being ironed out as the new terms both sides agreed to get parsed.

There is still money waiting to be spent. Ad executives expect this year’s calendar upfront — ads bought for the year starting in January — to be significantly larger this year and to be negotiated in October, a month earlier than usual.

“A large percentage of that 15% [decline in volume] are advertisers who moved to calendar, or scatter, and just needed more time, as opposed to stopped buying TV,” an agency media buyer said. “So at the end of the year, it won’t be down 15%, I don’t think.”

On top of that, prices are still hovering 10% to 20% above upfront in the scatter market for ad inventory not committed during the upfront auction.

“We’ve withheld; we’ve probably sold about 5% less volume than we would otherwise have done, say, last year and we’re comfortable doing that because of the strength in the scatter market,” Murdoch said.

None of that could have been predicted earlier this year.

Upfront’s Obit Was Premature

People were just learning about COVID-19 on March 3, when Fox News Channel canceled an upfront event scheduled for March 24. A week later, when NBCUniversal, Fox, ViacomCBS and The Walt Disney Co. canceled their lavish annual May upfront presentations and parties, it was clear the coronavirus would have a huge impact on the TV advertising business.

For a time, there were questions about whether or not there would even be an upfront — or a new television season to run commercials in. There were surveys and estimates that predicted ad spending could plunge by 30%, which in fact did happen in the early days of the recession caused by a virus that kept people at home and shut down businesses. 

“The prognostication in April that there’s never going to be another upfront, that this is going to be the end of buying and selling as we know it, that didn’t really come to fruition,” John Halley, chief operating officer of advertising revenue at ViacomCBS, said at Future’s Advanced Advertising Summit.

Procter & Gamble made a big stink about it being time to change the upfront and shift to a calendar upfront. But the packaged-goods giant quietly went to the networks and cut early deals, looking to get better pricing. 

“I’m surprised they didn’t get called out for that,” a network executive said.

Media agencies saw an opportunity to reset the market and get lower prices. “There was this narrative early on the minds of clients,” a network executive said. “They were thinking there was going to be a rollback. You were hearing 20%, ridiculous numbers.” 

Most of the networks dug in their heels and eventually, buyers had to put their money down and get their clients on the air. One buyer said the turning point was when COVID shut down television production. “In our models, supply went from being down 15% to being down 18%, 22%, 25%,” an agency media buyer said. “All of a sudden, it became a seller’s market.” 

“Yes, there were concessions made around flexibility,” Halley said. “It had to be done.” But in the end, the market “landed in a place that supported the model that we work under,” he said. Pricing moved in a positive direction and, “depending on what parts of the business you’re talking about, the volume was also there.”

On top of pricing, some agency executives were annoyed the networks waited until after many deals were struck to announce when they would start to air big hits, like NBC’s This Is Us. 

Nielsen threw a brief monkey wrench into the market when it said it wouldn’t be adding out-of-home viewers to its 2020-21 ratings as planned, a move that would lift audiences of entertainment programming by anywhere from 3% to 6%, network executives said. The networks erupted and Nielsen quickly reversed its course.

Digital inventory was also a big factor with ViacomCBS owning Pluto TV, Fox buying Tubi and The Walt Disney Co. taking control of Hulu.

One market participant estimated that linear volume was down 15%, while nonlinear revenue rose 50%. That leaves overall revenue down about 10% because, last year, media companies got 90% of their revenue from linear and 10% from nonlinear. This year it will be 80%-20%. “Advertisers are following the audience,” the participant said.

With their new OTT services, the networks can also offer buyers top shows like Fox’s The Masked Singer at better prices when they stream and attract a younger audience than when they appear on broadcast.

They could also offer buyers better pricing on broadcast if they agree to increase the dollars they’re spending on their streaming platforms.

“The nonlinear space is creating a lot of discounts,” a network executive said. “The dream that these companies have is that the streaming services are going to take off. And then you can reconfigure what the business really is.”

Talks Get Personal

Negotiating an upfront during a pandemic turned out to be a more personalized experience, some executives said. While the big presentations and parties were replaced by Zoom calls, negotiations tended to be more one on one with senior execs as the stakes grew and deadlines neared.

“A lot of times our negotiations are done with a group of us in one room and a group from the agency in another room, but this was a lot more one-on-one discussions than large group with large group,” one network executive said.

Where does this upfront market leave the business? 

“Well, we all had had to be flexible,” a network executive said. “But we also have to manage our business, and I think we’re going to learn whether we can live with what we’ve agreed to.”

One buyer said he remains concerned that the networks can’t do anything to keep ratings from continuing to fall. “Our retail clients don’t want their fourth quarter schedule to underdeliver and to get make-goods on some digital channel in January,” the buyer said.  λ

ABC had the top score in Monday prime, offering a rare simulcast of Monday Night Football. New Orleans Saints versus Las Vegas Raiders led the way to ABC getting a 1.6 in viewers 18-49, per the Nielsen overnights, and a 10 share. In second was Fox with a couple series premieres at 0.5/3. 

Corporate siblings ABC and ESPN shared the football game to mark the 50th anniversary of Monday Night Football. ABC had the Jets versus the Browns on Sept. 21, 1970. Last night’s game was the first Raiders game in their new Vegas home. 

Football took up all of prime on ABC. 

Fox had LA’s Finest, which it licensed from Spectrum Originals, and the premiere of the Kim Cattrall drama Filthy Rich. LA’s Finest got a 0.5 and Filthy Rich a 0.4. 

NBC got a 0.4/3 and CBS and Telemundo a 0.4/2. On NBC, American Ninja Warrior got a 0.5 across two hours and Dateline NBC posted a 0.4. Both shows were level with last week. 

CBS had comedy repeats leading into Love Island up 25% to 0.5. The premiere of Manhunt: Deadly Games got a 0.3. 

On Telemundo it was Exatlon Estados Unidos up 33% to 0.4 and Todo Por Mi Hija at a flat 0.3. Enemigo Intimo 2 doubled last week’s score for a 0.4. 

Univision scored a 0.3/2. Medicos got a flat 0.4 and the premiere of Imperio De Metiras a 0.4. Dulce Ambicion fell 33% to 0.2.

The CW got a 0.1/1 with repeats. 

ESPN’s Pittsburgh Steelers-New York Giants Monday Night Football telecast drew 10.7 million viewers, falling short of last year’s MNF opening game numbers, according to Nielsen.

Audience numbers for the game, won by the Steelers 26-16, were down from the 13.1 million viewers that tuned into the Sept. 10, 2019 New Orleans Saints-Houston Texans MNF opener, according to Nielsen. The Steelers-Giants game finished as the third most watched sports event on cable in 2020 -- behind ESPN’s Jan. 13 LSU-Clemson College Football Playoff National Championship Game, and its Jan. 1 Oregon-Wisconsin Rose Bowl Game telecast.

The game also fell short of Fox News’ Feb. 4 live telecast of the State of the Union address, which drew 11 million viewers, said Nielsen. 

The second game of ESPN’s MNF doubleheader telecast between the Tennessee Titans and the Denver Broncos drew 7.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

Season 51 of Monday Night Football starts on ESPN Sept. 14 with a doubleheader. The Pittsburgh Steelers take on the New York Giants at 7:15 p.m. ET, and the Tennessee Titans face the Denver Broncos with kickoff at 10:10 p.m. ET.

There are 17 games in the season’s lineup. 

Sept. 21, it’s the New Orleans Saints versus the Las Vegas Raiders, with the kickoff in its regular 8:15 p.m. ET slot. Sept. 28, it’s Kansas City Chiefs versus Baltimore Ravens. 

Oct. 5 it’s the Atlanta Falcons versus the Green Bay Packers. Oct. 12, the Los Angeles Chargers face the Saints. 

On Oct. 19, it’s the Arizona Cardinals versus the Dallas Cowboys. Oct. 26, it’s the Los Angeles Rams versus the Chicago Bears. 

Tom Brady and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers play the Giants Nov. 2 and his old squad, the New England Patriots, play the New York Jets a week later. 

The season concludes Dec. 28. 

Games are streamed through the ESPN app and ESPN Deportes has the Spanish-language production. 

ESPN will telecast classic Monday Night Football games over a five week period beginning March 30, as part of a deal between the network and the NFL.

The games will air Monday nights from March 30 to April 27 and will include the November 2018 Kansas City Chiefs- Los Angeles Rams game -- the highest-scoring game in NFL history -- as well as the New Orleans Saints’ Superdome reopening game after Hurricane Katrina in April 2006. 

An hour of ESPN’s Peyton’s Places interview shows will precede each Monday Night FootballClassics each week at 7 p.m.

These telecasts will also include inventory to support COVID-19 relief-focused organizations, said network officials. 

Last night’s Los Angeles Rams-Kansas City Chiefs Monday Night Football shootout drew an impressive 16.6 million viewers for ESPN, according to Nielsen.

The game, in which the Rams defeated the Chiefs 54-51 in the highest-scoring game in MNF’s 49-year history, was the most watched MNF telecast since the Detroit Lions-Dallas Cowboys game drew 18.6 million viewers in December 2016. 

Further, the game was ESPN’s most watched telecast since this past January’s Georgia-Alabama College Football Playoff National Championship game drew 27 million viewers.

The 16.7 million viewers for the Rams-Chiefs game is up 54% compared to last year’s Atlanta Falcons-Seattle Seahawks game in week 11, which averaged 10.8 million viewers, according to the network.

Overall, ESPN’s Monday Night Football telecasts are up 10% season to date, according to the network. 

BTIG media analyst Richard Greenfield – one of the early backers of the over-the-top model – predicted that online retailer Amazon is best poised to become the most disruptive force in the pay television industry, outpacing Netflix and using its vast resources to fund forays into sports and other entertainment.

“They [Amazon] are all about the bundle, it is just a different bundle than what we are accustomed to,” Greenfield said on The CUSP Show, the official podcast of the Columbia University Sports Management Program. “It’s music, it’s video, it’s shipping. They want to be a bundled player.”

Amazon has already committed to spending billions on original programming and earlier this week revealed that its Amazon Prime service, which includes free two-day shipping for products, video and music, just passed 100 million customers.

Amazon is no stranger to sports – it renewed a deal for streaming video rights for Thursday Night Football in April  – and has been thought to have greater aspirations. But the company has been reluctant to spend heavily on products that it can’t the directly to additional subscriptions. While sports hasn’t passed that smell test so far, it may in the near future.

Greenfield said data gleaned from the company’s digital relationship with viewers will be the difference.

“They are going to use that data to inform their decision making,” Greenfield said. “Amazon ran a test, they clearly understand now, even [with] just a simulcast, how many people watched, how long did they watch, why did they tune out, what did we learn, do those people buy more NFL merchandise over the course of the next year, did those people buy more NFL tickets over the next year. It’s using the data to make a much wider ranged decision than the way a traditional media company can make a decision.”

Greenfield doesn’t believe Amazon or any other tech giant wants to spend the money to wrest Sunday football from the broadcast networks. But he believes that Monday Night Football could be an attractive target.

“I think the NFL will keep Sunday on broadcast TV for the foreseeable future,” Greenfield said. “I think reach, and the success of Sunday night football, Thursday Night Football and Sunday afternoon football is going to keep that on broadcast well into the next decade. If you wanted to change the TV ecosystem in a meaningful way, Monday Night Football already moved from broadcast to cable once, moving from cable to the Internet doesn’t seem crazy.”

Greenfield noted there are risks – he estimated the NFL gets $2 billion a year for MNF rights from ESPN.

“The dollars are significant. On the flip side, this sort of feels like, if you’re a tech player, this is your one big shot to see how you can change the game. …If you pull that sports piece out of the Jenga puzzle the game collapses.”

And the analyst added that other tech companies could also enter the fray – Facebook bid on Indian Premier League cricket rights last year (it lost), streams Major League Soccer games  and in March reached a deal to stream 25 Major League Baseball games this season, Apple is investing heavily in entertainment content and even Netflix, which so far has stayed away from sports, could find a way in.

“The players that will matter [in sports rights] are going to be bigger companies that have the balance sheets and capacity to do it today and could attack this opportunity over the course of the next five years in a very methodical way,” Greenfield said.  

ESPN’s NFL Monday Night Football dominated African-American viewing for the week of Nov. 6 to Nov. 12 – one of four programs from the sports network to finish in the top 10, according to Nielsen. 

ESPN’s Nov. 6 coverage of the Green Bay Packers-Detroit Lions game drew 1.7 million African-American viewers, topping all cable shows for the week. ESPN’s Nov. 11 Alabama–Mississippi State college football game finished 6th for the week, while its two Nov. 8 live NBA game telecasts finished in the 8th and 9th spot respectively, according to Nielsen.

Bravo’s Nov. 12 episode of Real Housewives Of Atlanta was second for the week, followed by VH1’s Nov. 6 Love And Hip Hop show and OWN’s Nov. 7 episode of If Loving You Is Wrong.

Bravo’s freshman series Xscape Still Kickin It finished fifth with its Nov. 12 episode. OWN’s Nov. 8 Queen Sugar show finished in 7th place, and TNT’s Nov. 9 NBA basketball telecast rounded out the top 10, according to Nielsen.

ESPN, led by its Monday Night Football franchise, dominated cable’s weekly primetime ratings charts for a fourth consecutive week, according to Nielsen.

ESPN averaged 3.7 million viewers during the week of Oct. 2 to Oct. 8 to finish first among all cable networks and ahead of second place Fox News Channel, which averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen. TBS (2.3 million viewers) and FS1 (1.6 million viewers) rode strong performances from their respective Major League Baseball playoffs coverage to finish third and fourth for the week respectively.

MSNBC (1.4 million homes); CNN, USA and HGTV (all tied with 1.1 million viewers); Disney Channel (925,000) and Hallmark Channel (924,000) rounded out the top 10 most watched cable networks in primetime for the week.

Fox News bested ESPN, Nickelodeon, MSNBC and CNN on a total-day basis to win in the category for a fourth straight week.

ESPN was the top choice among adults 18-49 both in primetime and on a total-day basis, according to Nielsen. 

Most Watched Cable Shows Oct. 2-8, 2017

DateShowNetworkTotal Viewers

10/2   Monday Night Football – Wash/KC                                    ESPN              12.0 million

10/3   MLB Wild Card Game – Minn/NY Yankees                          ESPN               6.8 million

10/8   MLB Divisional Series – Cleve/NY Yankees                         FS1                 5.2 million

10/7   College Football – Alabama-Texas A&M                            ESPN                4.7 million

10/4   MLB Wild Card Game – Colo./Ariz.                                   TBS                  4.4 million

10/5   Thursday Night Football – N.E./T.B.                                 NFL Network     3.9 million

10/3   Hannity                                                                         Fox News         3.8 million

10/2   Special Report W/ Bret Baier                                           Fox News         3.8 million

10/2   Tucker Carlson Tonight                                                   Fox News         3.8 million

10/5   MLB Divisional Series – Cleve/NY Yankees                        FS1                 3.7 million

10/2   Hannity                                                                        Fox News          3.7 million

Source: Nielsen

ESPN rode the return of its Monday Night Football franchise to a first-place finish on the weekly primetime cable ratings charts.

Related: Engineering a Monday Night Comeback: Q&A With ESPN’s Burke Magnus

ESPN averaged 2.8 million viewers during the week of Sept. 11 to Sept. 17 to best all cable networks, according to Nielsen. Fox News Channel was second with 2.1 million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.6 million watchers and USA Network’s 1.4 million viewers. 

HGTV (1.3 million viewers), NFL Network (1.2 million), TBS (1.1 million) and History, CNN and Investigation Discovery (1 million) comprised the rest of the top 10 most watched cable networks of the week. 

Fox News Channel regained the top weekly ratings spot on a 24-hour basis after relinquishing it to The Weather Channel last week, with Nickelodeon, ESPN, MSNBC and Adult Swim following close behind.

Adult Swim was the most watched network among adults 18-49 on a 24-hour basis, while ESPN scored best with the demo in primetime during the week.

Most Watched Cable Shows For The Week of Sept. 11 to Sept. 17

Date ShowNetworkTotal Viewers

9/11   MNF – New Orleans-Minnesota                            ESPN                           11.4 million

9/11   MNF – LA Chargers-Denver                                 ESPN                           9.9 million

9/14   TNF – Houston-Cincinnati                                   NFL Network                 8.0 million

9/14   NFL Total Access                                               NFL Network                 3.3 million

9/14   NFL Pre-Kick                                                     NFL Network                 3.0 million

9/11   WWE Monday Night Raw (8-9 pm)                      USA Network                3.0 million

9/11   WWE Monday Night Raw (9-10 pm)                    USA Network                2.9 million

9/14   Rachel Maddow Show                                        MSNBC                        2.9 million

9/12   Tucker Carlson Tonight                                      Fox News                    2.9 million

9/13   Rachel Maddow Show                                        MSNBC                       2.7 million

Source: Nielsen

As the National Football League gets set to kick off the 2017 season, analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson Research is predicting that ratings will be up in primetime, reversing last year’s surprising declines.

THE SPORTS ISSUE:Engineering a Monday Night Comeback at ESPN: Q&A With Burke Magnus

Nathanson sees NBC’s Sunday Night Football rising 5% in total viewers and ESPN Monday Night Football up 11% based on stronger matchups on their schedules.

Down the road, Nathanson said, there could be a shakeup in NFL rights deals, mainly because the Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN is paying much more -- $1.9 billion per year -- for its Monday Night Football package than Comcast’s NBC pays for Sunday Night Football -- $960 million -- even though the Sunday night generates much higher ratings because it gets better matchups.

The NFL is also giving better matchups to shore up its Thursday Night Football packages on NBC and CBS, diluting MNF, he says. Rights fees for those Thursday games are also cheaper than ESPN’s MNF.

When those deals expire in 2021 and 2022, “Disney would be wise to drop MNF and focus on all their energy and resources on securing the preferable SNF package, which is now nearly $1 billion cheaper and includes three Super Bowls,” Nathanson said. “This would then potentially force NBC into bidding for either the CBS AFC package or the Fox NFC package.”

That bidding would drive up the fees and open the door to new bidders for MNF, including either Turner or a digital player like Facebook, Amazon, Google or Apple.

THE SPORTS ISSUE: Sports Streaming Picks Up the Pace |OTT Players Could Change Television’s Sports Game

The season starts Thursday night (Sept. 7) with the champion New England Patriots taking on the Kansas City Chiefs..

Last season's NFL ratings were down 12% up through Election Day (Nov. 8, 2016). They were down 5% the remainder of the season. Reasons for the declines included increased interest in political news, bad matchups resulting in more blowouts and even quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel in protest during the national anthem.

Despite the ratings drop, ad revenue wasup 3% last year to $.35 billion for the NFL season including the playoffs and Super Bowl, according to research company Standard Media Index.

Nathanson noted that for TV, the NFL represents a big chunk of both ratings and revenue. Last year, NFL game and other football programming — including the Super Bowl -- represented 60% of Fox’s live plus same day P2+ GRPs. It was close to 30% for NBC, ESPN and CBS.

The season, Nathanson said, based on pre-season power rankings of the 25 best matchups, nine are headed for CBS, eight for Fox and seven for NBC. ESPN has only two of the top 25 matchups. CBS also has the largest share of the bottom 25 matchup, he noted.

On Thursday night, the average power ranking of the teams involved has improved. NBC’s schedule shows the biggest improvement. CBS’s power ranking is unchanged and the NFL Networks matchups are weaker than last year.

ESPN’S Monday Night Football franchise is looking to rebound this season after being sacked for a major ratings loss last year, when the venerable series suffered a 12% year-to-year viewership loss in averaging 11.4 million viewers.

ESPN executive vice president of programming and scheduling Burke Magnus recently spoke to Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the network’s plans to score big ratings gains on Monday nights with a stronger, more competitive schedule of games. Magnus also said he’s bullish on the National Football League, as well as the network’s current $15 billion TV deal with the league, which runs through 2021. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

THE SPORTS ISSUE: Sports Streaming Picks Up the Pace |OTT Players Could Change Television’s Sports Game

MCN: How does Monday Night Football bounce back from a double-digit year-to-year ratings falloff?
Burke Magnus: The first thing we did was to work hand in glove with the NFL to make sure that they were completely aware of our priorities on this year’s schedule. It’s not that we don’t do this every year, because we do, but certainly this year was a little bit different coming off the performance of last year’s schedule. The NFL takes a ton of pride in ownership of its overall schedule — they have a lot of partners and a lot of mouths to feed. But they were equally as concerned with not just Monday Night Football but across the board last year. They really took our input and our priorities into consideration when making the schedule. We just worked closer with them than probably we ever had before to try and get the schedule in a place that we are happy with going in. I think it’s vastly improved.

MCN: How has the schedule improved from last year?
BM: One of the primary things we requested and they delivered was an increase in divisional matchups. We have nine this year versus four last year. The reason for that focus is we think that the divisional games are more airtight from an interest perspective just because they are rivalry games, even if one or both of the teams don’t have the records that they had hoped for going into their Monday Night Footballappearance. Just like you do in college football, you throw out the records to a certain degree when you know that the Lions and Packers are playing because it’s a big NFC North matchup. We have a couple of those big ones but we have nine overall, which we think will be good insurance against the records going into those games.

Last year, we had some tough sledding from a competitive perspective — we had a 14½-point average margin of victory across all of the games, which was more than double what it was in 2015 and well above average. That’s the part we can’t control, obviously, but … we’re cautiously optimistic that was a big contributor to last year’s performance.

Related: Analyst Predicts Higher Ratings for Prime-Time NFL Broadcasts

MCN: This year Monday Night Football is not following the Summer Olympics nor is it competing with news coverage in a presidential election season. Given all of those factors, are you confident you will be able to definitively improve on last year’s ratings?
BM: I would say we’re pretty optimistic. That dropoff was unusually large — it’s an outlier when you look at the last decade of Monday Night Football. As you noted there were a variety of factors that contributed to that, some of which don’t exist anymore, like the Olympics, and some of which are different than they were a year ago, like the election. That’s not to suggest the news networks and coverage of that sort of content isn’t going to still be higher than usual, but nonetheless I don’t think it can approach the headwinds that we faced last year.

MCN: ESPN’s Monday Night Football wasn’t the only NFL TV property to suffer ratings losses last year. Are you concerned about a downturn in interest in watching live games?
BM: No, I wouldn’t go that far. The NFL has done a masterful job seemingly always being up, but in our business you can’t be up every year — it defies gravity. So, to a certain degree, I think a bunch of factors conspired to have an off year. The NFL again to their credit hit this head on in terms of making sure that the scheduling was done in a way to get off to a good start and hopefully carry through. They adjusted commercial formats to help declutter and simplify the television presentation with less breaks. They are laser-focused on this and they are doing everything they can to make sure that their presentation is as friendly as possible to potential fans and viewers.

MCN: Some industry observers have questioned whether ESPN is getting its money’s worth from its Monday Night Football deal. Halfway into the network’s 10-year Monday Night Football TV extension with the NFL, are you satisfied with the value generated from the deal thus far?
BM: We’re very satisfied and we’ve got a long way to go. It is critically important to our business ... it’s the most popular sports property by a wide margin. The NFL is delivering everything to us that we bought and licensed from them, and I think at some certain point in time — especially in light of what was an unfortunate performance last year again, for a variety of reasons — I think people tend to read between the lines. But if we’re up 12%, 15% or 20% [in ratings], knock on wood, I think those articles will be more difficult to write. We know we’re in the live sports business so this stuff ebbs and flows, so you can’t get too excited when you’re up and you can’t get too dejected when you’re down. You just have to keep your focus and try and make it the best it can possibly be. The attitude we took with the NFL and scheduling this year was to just redouble our focus on trying to grow the audience — and you know they’re great partners in that regard — so we’re very happy.

The emergence of over-the-top and streaming services into the increasingly crowded competition for sports rights has upped the ante for league programming, but analysts are split on whether the inclusion of deep-pocketed tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook will be enough to maintain the hefty increases of the most recent past.

That could be good news for pay TV distributors, but not so much for content owners — especially as two well-known sports rights properties are up for grabs in the next year: the National Football League’s Thursday Night Football package and the Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts package now owned by Fox Sports.

Thursday Night Football rights, currently shared by broadcasters CBS and NBC (and simulcast on the league’s own channel, NFL Network), are slated to expire later this year. The property got a taste of what could come when online retailer Amazon won the bidding for streaming rights for the package in April. Its $50 million offer, which puts games on the Amazon Prime Video platform, was five times the $10 million Twitter paid last season and, to some, set the tone for negotiations for larger, more popular packages.

The math is pretty simple, according to Pivotal Research Group senior research analyst – advertising Brian Wieser. “More demand for the same amount of rights should be inflationary,” he said.

Essential Appeal of Sports
Sports has become even more of a hot property for programmers as viewership has fragmented and with consumers just as likely to watch content on their phones or tablets as their living room TV screens. As audiences have scattered, sports watching has been the one constant.

Games are appointment viewing and best watched on larger screens in the home, complete with commercial interruptions, in step with the prevailing business model for most traditional networks.

But declining subscriber numbers at networks such as ESPN indicate that sports may not be quite as invincible as once believed. Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan pointed to declining ratings for NFL games last year — down 9% in the regular season and 6% for the playoffs — as an example.

While some of that ratings decline may have been due to a rather contentious presidential election that drew more viewers to news channels, poor matchups and the absence of big stars early in the season, Eagan said that digital video services are putting more resources into other types of content.

“It seems that most of these companies, ironically enough, are more comfortable with original programming,” Eagan said. “I think it’s because it casts a wider net than sports does.”

The length of most sports deals — 10 years, in some cases — has caused some distributors to pause, Eagan added, especially since the TV business is changing so rapidly. Ten years ago there were no virtual MVPDs and Netflix was just beginning to offer streaming media, making most of its money by selling DVDs through the mail. Who knows what new distribution platform could emerge in a decade’s time?

“I think media companies want as much flexibility as they can get right now,” Eagan said. “When you sign these deals, you have to be specific about what the rights are. And it’s hard to be specific about rights if you don’t know what the platform might be.”

In the past, rightsholders have been well aware of their power in the ever-evolving TV landscape and have been more than willing to wield it, as evidenced by the huge premiums networks paid for sports rights over the past few years. But as other big rights deals come up for renewal in the next five years, there is an increasing belief that the big premiums paid for sports rights in the past won’t be maintained.

It wasn’t so long ago that hefty increases were de rigueur in the sports rights business. In 2014, when ESPN, Fox Sports and Time Warner Inc.’s Turner networks agreed to pay a collective $1.52 billion per year for the rights to Major League Baseball games, that price was double the $760 million paid for the same rights previously. Last year, when Turner and ESPN agreed to pay $2.54 billion per year for National Basketball Association rights, that figure was 173% higher than the $930 million per year the parties previously paid for the same games.

With tech giants like Amazon and Facebook — which offers college football games via its Stadium: Live home page and has rights for 20 Major League Baseball and 22 Major League Soccer games this year — getting into the game, those prices were only expected to get higher.

Canaccord Genuity senior equity analyst Michael Graham isn’t convinced that Amazon and other streaming companies will invest heavily in sports programming, though. While he acknowledged Amazon’s willingness to pay top dollar for TNF streaming rights, he finds it a big leap to go from that level of spending to the billions of dollars that would be required to be a serious bidder for major sports like the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball.

“Amazon came to the table in a strong way to get those rights, but it’s mostly just a test case,” Graham said of the TNF investment. “It’s possible they may move more into sports, but it’s super-duper expensive and there is no direct revenue associated with that content spend.”

Graham said that for services like Amazon Prime and Netflix, which have no advertising, the payback for investing in content is in the number of additional subscribers that content brings. He doesn’t think making a big commitment to sports will translate into enough new customers. Other analysts feel the same way, but note that digital companies could invest in smaller packages, like perhaps Monday Night Football, which is currently locked up by ESPN until 2021.

ESPN paid about $1.9 billion per year for MNF rights, according to MoffettNathanson senior analyst Michael Nathanson.

In a presentation to team owners and executives at Evanta’s Global Sports Summit conference in July, BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield said that he believed Monday Night Football would be a good fit for either Amazon or Apple. He observed that Amazon Prime uses content most often as a retention tool.

“Even if there is nothing on Amazon Video that you care about this month, you’re still a subscriber for shipping, or you’re using your Alexa for music,” Greenfield said at the July conference. “They’re trying to make it so that there is always something. That’s why Monday Night Football would fit in great. Just another reason to be a Prime subscriber.”

Amazon did agree to pay $50 million for Thursday Night Football streaming rights — five times the earlier price — but would it be willing to pay the same premium for the full Thursday-night package or for Monday Night Football or Sunday games?

Stepping Up to Monday Nights?
Graham said a Monday Night Football bid might make sense for Amazon or another streamer, but he isn’t expecting a big commitment.

“It makes sense directionally,” Graham said. “Amazon does things on a small scale. Sometime in the next several years, with the exception of Netflix, there is likely to be more intensive experimentation around sports content. It might be most logically with Facebook, because you can have the social media commentary and sharing around that content which could help to monetize it more fully.”

As always, competition will be key. Pricing has a tendency to go higher the more bidders that are involved. And with traditional networks desperate to keep their dwindling subscriber base intact, the entrance of an Amazon, Apple or Facebook into the bidding can only be good for the content owners.

“Will there be the competition among the digital companies to drive those rights values up?” Greenfield said. “I don’t think we know yet, but I think that will be the single biggest swing factor in determining the future of sports rights values from where we are today.”

When ESPN suffered double-digit ratings losses last year for Monday Night Football, industry naysayers immediately began to predict the beginning of an overall ratings decline for live sports content amid a crowded TV environment and growing competition from video streaming services.

Yet ratings numbers from the first round of the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League playoffs during April show that live sports programming can still ring the ratings bell for cable nets.

Both ESPN and TNT generated double-digit ratings gains for their respective coverage of an entertaining and surprisingly competitive opening round of the NBA Playoffs. TNT averaged 3.4 million viewers during its first-round coverage, up 13% over last year — the network’s most-watched playoff coverage in three years.

TNT’s first round NBA postseason games also helped the network dethrone Fox News Channel atop cable’s weekly primetime ratings chart for the past two weeks.

ESPN averaged 3 million viewers for its first-round NBA postseason coverage, up 14% from the 2.6 million viewers in 2016. The network’s increases came as ESPN also posted several live streaming records during the first round, including a whopping 135 million total minutes streamed for its games, up 40% from last year.

NBC Sports Group’s coverage of the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs also skated to strong first-round ratings performances. The group averaged 557,000 viewers for its first round coverage across NBCSN, USA Network and CNBC, an 11% increase from the same period last season, even with the inclusion of five Canadian teams compared to an all-American playoff lineup last year.

Related: NBC Chases The Cup Across Platforms

NBC’s cable networks were able to televise first round games side by side with regional sports networks in most markets (excluding Pittsburgh and Boston) for the first time, helping the group to post its highest first round audience since 2012, according to network officials.

It remains to be seen if cable can continue its ratings streak as the NBA and NHL playoffs enter the later rounds, but early results show that its still game on for live sports on cable.

ESPN’s 2017 Monday Night Football schedule will feature both Super Bowl teams and all 12 playoff teams from last year, the network announced Thursday.

The network’s 17-game primetime schedule will feature one appearance from the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots (Dec. 11 against Miami) and two appearances by the Atlanta Falcons (Nov. 20 against Seattle and Dec. 18 against Tampa Bay.)

In addition, all of last year’s playoff teams – New England, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas Cowboys, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, Houston Texans, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers – will make at least one Monday night appearance.

ESPN’s coverage will open on Sept. 11 with New Orleans Saints-Minnesota Vikings and Los Angeles Chargers-Denver Broncos doubleheader telecast, said the network.

The network will look to rebound from its disappointing 2016 campaign which generated a double-digit ratings decline from 2015.

ESPN’s regular season schedule is a follows: 

As fans of The Walking Dead continue to recover from a frighteningly shocking baseball-bat beatdown of two protagonists in the show’s seventh-season opener, some sports-industry observers are closing their eyes in fear over the scary decline of ratings for National Football League primetime telecasts.

Indeed, the audience for ESPN’s NFL Monday Night Football is down more than 20% compared with last season. While ESPN’s NFL games remain among the most-watched shows of the week on cable, the 8.5 million viewers ESPN’s Oct. 17 Arizona Cardinals-New York Jets game garnered was only good for seventh place among all shows airing during the week of Oct. 17-23.

The week's leaders were the aforementioned The Walking Dead episode on Oct. 23, pulling in 17 million viewers, and the Oct. 19 third and final presidential debate, which drew 11.3 million viewers to Fox News Channel.

Sunday Night Football and Thursday Night Football primetime games are down double-digits year to year as well. Afternoon contests, too, are down by single digits.

Some see those numbers and wonder if the NFL’s run as the darling of TV sports ratings may soon come to an end.

Yet while wounded, the league has plenty of life in it still. There’s no doubt that the intense presidential campaign and the Chicago Cubs’ historic run to the World Series have helped sack NFL ratings at night. It seems clear NFL telecasts will see a ratings bump as the political season comes to an end and the march toward the pro-football playoffs begins.

Advertisers don’t seem to have a problem with the NFL’s lackluster TV ratings performance, according to Broadcasting & Cable, with one unnamed advertiser saying, “It’s nothing we’re freaking out over” and “The networks are working with us and right now; we are still in a good place.”

Sports media consultant Lee Berke noted that football fans are watching NFL games on a variety of platforms that aren’t effectively being measured yet. “Every game is offered live on three or four different screens, but we’re not measuring anything on a realtime basis except for one screen,” he said.

Despite increased platform viewing and strong competition, Berke said NFL games remain among the highest viewed programs on television. “Regardless of the up-and-down nature of the ratings, the NFL on most weeks generates enormous viewership above and beyond any other platform. Advertisers seem to be fine with the ratings ... they’re still getting far more viewership at the right time of year than any other category of programming.”