Over the last several months, Netflix has continued its immersion into the live sports space through a variety of media rights deals and ventures. The company recently inked a contract to broadcast the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031, and it also just commenced a 10-year deal with WWE to present Raw for a reported $5 billion in total.
Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, Netflix worked with Most Valuable Promotions to air a live boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson that secured an average minute audience of 108 million live viewers globally. In addition to several new documentary announcements and premieres, the company engaged in its first live game broadcasts of the NFL on Christmas Day averaging more than 30 million global viewers.
Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive officer of Netflix, recently attended the Golden Globe Awards where he elaborated on the success of the NFL Christmas Day games in an interview with Kevin Weekes for Sportico. Netflix reached nearly 65 million U.S. viewers for the doubleheader, breaking the record for the most-streamed NFL games in U.S. history. Data from Nielsen Media Research indicates that the two games collectively averaged 24.2 million viewers in the United States.
“It was a great day,” Sarandos said. “For us, it was the whole goal at the beginning was to make it a full day of entertainment, including two great NFL football games, the Beyoncé Bowl and just have a great day of coverage that was aware that it was Christmas Day.”
For the NFL presentation specifically, CBS Sports produced the live game broadcasts and NFL Media produced pregame, postgame and studio halftime programming, while EverWonder Studio executive produced Netflix NFL Christmas Day as a whole. According to its latest quarterly earnings report, Netflix has approximately 282.7 million global paid subscribers, and its advertising tier reaches 70 million global users. When Sarandos was asked as to why Netflix was becoming involved in sports, he replied “Why not?” and then further elucidated how the genre plays into the overall business the media company has built.
“I think people, for us, our core business is kind of sports storytelling – the great documentaries, the behind the scenes, everything that raises the passion level for sports – and then eventually, I think they’ll come a time where we’ll do more and more of this, but right now, I think what we’re trying to do is all live events,” Sarandos said. “Some of those are sports – the way that the NFL football games were, or some of them are things like the Tom Brady roast or every week the WWE, which is something in-between.”
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