If you would like advice for a long-term relationship, I offer this: Find someone who loves you a similar way news outlets love year-end content.
The New Yorker I wrote an article 11 years ago about why our brain loves lists, and it still holds up today. Among other things: It organizes information spatially and guarantees a finite story.
The NFL story will in fact proceed in 2025 and beyond, but in the next section we provide eight NFL media stories that piqued our interest in 2024.
1. Tom Brady begins his NFL broadcasting profession
Fox has broadcast rights to the Super Bowl this yr, meaning Brady might be broadcasting the league's biggest game in his rookie season as a TV analyst. He is 15 games right into a 10-year, $375 million contract with Fox, a journey that has led to quite a few comments on his performance, including several posts by this creator.
Brady's broadcast work has improved over the course of the season – not a lot that he’s an elite TV analyst, however the progress is noticeable. Still, the long-term prognosis here is that Brady's juggling as owner and TV analyst for the Las Vegas Raiders, and the restrictions that include it, appears untenable for Fox and Brady.
Tom Brady has improved as a game caller, but February's Super Bowl might be the last word test of his progress. (Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
2. Netflix is getting an NFL games package
Netflix and the NFL announced a three-season deal for Christmas Day games through 2026 in May. This deal gets even larger as Netflix secures exclusive broadcast rights within the United States for the 2027 and 2031 editions of the Women's World Cup. These are vital signals to the market (together with its WWE rights deal given its live element) that Netflix has evolved from an interest in sports properties to a legitimate sports rights holder.
The streaming giant aired the Kansas City Chiefs-Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens-Houston Texans games on Christmas Day and largely avoided a glitch-filled repeat of its Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight event.
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3. Peacock broadcasts an everyday season game from São Paulo
The Philadelphia Eagles-Green Bay Packers game on September 6 was the primary NFL regular season game in South America and aired exclusively on Peacock, the streaming network's third exclusive NFL game following the Buffalo Bills-Los Angeles Chargers regular season game in December 2023 and the Miami Dolphins-Chiefs AFC wild card playoff game last January.
The result was a major increase in viewership for the league and the streamer. Peacock delivered 14.2 million viewers for the Eagles-Packers, significantly higher than the 7.3 million for the Bills-Chargers and Peacock's second-best NFL streaming audience of all time, behind only the Chiefs-Dolphins game (23 million viewers). . The figures include numbers from the over-the-air markets where the games ran.
The NFL will play eight international games in 2025, including in Madrid, as Spain will turn into the sixth country to host a regular-season NFL game. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt have spoken openly about it Play 16 games abroad yearly within the near future, in keeping with this report from SBJ's Ben Fischer. It is evident that we’ll soon see a window with a brand new international media rights package on Sunday morning.
4. Super Bowl LVIII sets TV rankings record
When it involves comparing today's sports viewership to yesterday's, we live in an apples-to-pomegranates world, as a consequence of aspects like latest out-of-home viewership data and cord-cutters and cord-cutters. Based on today's figures from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, the Chiefs' 25-22 time beyond regulation victory over the San Francisco 49ers in February's Super Bowl averaged 123.7 million viewers across television and streaming platforms. That makes it the most-watched broadcast in history, surpassing the previous mark of 115.1 million for Kansas City's last-minute win over Philadelphia within the previous Super Bowl.
Fans watch Super Bowl LVIII in front of the Chase Center in San Francisco. The game was the highest-rated broadcast in television history. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)
5. The rise of different programming
The alternative broadcasts of NFL games reached a brand new dimension in 2024 with an animated “Simpsons” alternate forged from “Monday Night Football” airs on ESPN+ and Disney+, and NBC Sports makes its NFL alternative broadcast debut on Peacock with the Texans-Chiefs game last week. This might be followed by alternative shows on Nickelodeon and ESPN's now long-running Manning Brothers show, in addition to a show featuring “Toy Story.”
6. The New Heights podcast is blowing up
The popular podcast — hosted by brothers Jason Kelce, the Eagles' center from 2011 to 2023, and current Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — signed a take care of Amazon's Wondery podcast network in 2024 to turn into the show's latest home .
The show landed on the metrics lists of the largest podcasts within the US and has nearly 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube. One of the interesting points of the deal is Wondery's plan to translate the podcast into different languages to expand its global audience, including in NFL-heavy markets just like the United Kingdom and Mexico. That's a blank spot for NFL fans.
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7. New broadcast rules for higher access
It wasn't a coincidence that you simply saw more in-game interviews during NFL games this season. Last May, the NFL broadcasting department outlined access changes for the NFL's television partners following a review between the league and its media rights holders. The common goal? To improve the sport content we see as NFL viewers. The latest rules included in-game coach interviews for all games, pregame player interviews for all games, pregame network coverage within the locker room, preseason player interviews, and network cameras within the coaches' booths. Search for it to proceed.
8. The NFL was ordered to pay $4.7 billion within the Sunday Ticket antitrust lawsuit…only to have the lawsuit overturned
In August, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles overturned a $4.7 billion judgment against the NFL for collusion in raising prices for its “NFL Sunday Ticket” television package. The judge disqualified the expert reports that the jury had used to find out damages. (The jury's verdict had threatened to upend the league's strategy of selling exclusive television packages to broadcasters.) Next up: The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Per Sportico's legal creator and sports law professor Michael McMannA call will likely take many months, if not longer.
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image credit : www.nytimes.com