With the cost of watching NFL games and other sports soaring, the Federal Communications Commission has signaled it may crack down on pro leagues’ deals with streaming services.
The FCC on Wednesday asked the public for comment on how the shift from traditional TV broadcasts to streamers brings “benefit or harm” to consumers — a potential first step before a more serious probe.
The filing from the commission’s Media Bureau noted that NFL games aired last year on Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Netflix, YouTube and six other streamers — potentially costing an estimated $1,500 to watch every pro football game.
“For decades, Americans enjoyed turning on their TV & quickly finding the game they wanted to see. Yet watching your favorite team play isn’t as easy these day,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote in a Wednesday post on X.
“Many games are still on broadcast, but an increasing number are on a range of different online platforms,” he added.
The FCC’s questions for the public focus both on consumers — asking, “How have changes in the marketplace affected viewers’ ability to watch nationally televised live sports?” — and on local TV stations. One of the questions about the latter asks how “fragmentation” helps or hurts stations’ ability to “meet their public interest obligations.”
The commission noted that broadcast stations have heavily relied on advertising revenue from games to support local news and reporting.
The Post has sought comment from the FCC and the NFL.
The FCC’s new filing noted that the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 has provided antitrust relief to leagues to negotiate media rights and allowed pro leagues to pool their individual teams’ TV rights into massive packages.
However, sports media rights fees have “exponentially increased” since Congress passed that legislation in the 1960s, the commission stated.
In 1961, for example, the National Football League entered into a two-year rights agreement with CBS worth $9.8 million – far below its most recent media rights deals valued at more than $10 billion per year, according to the FCC.
Pricey media rights deals have turned the NFL into a serious money-making business, with nearly all of the league’s 32 teams led by billionaires.
The Denver Broncos are owned by Walmart heir Rob Walton, who has an estimated net worth of $148 billion, while the Kansas City Chiefs are led by the Hunt family, worth roughly $24.8 billion, according to estimates from Bloomberg and Forbes.
“Many sporting events that were previously available through free broadcast and traditional pay-TV packages, are now only available through a myriad of stand-alone subscription streaming services,” the FCC said in its notice.
“This shift has led to notable frustration among many consumers and sports fans. Sports fans are increasingly left with a fragmented ecosystem that requires them to subscribe to multiple services to watch their favorite teams.”
The NFL holds media rights agreements with streamers owned by Disney, Paramount, Fox Corporation, NBCUniversal, NFL Network, Amazon, Google and Netflix – which are expected to rake in more than $100 billion in sports rights fees, the FCC noted.
Fox Corporation shares common ownership with The Post’s parent company, News Corp.
The other major professional sports leagues similarly hold several media rights deals with varying streaming services worth billions of dollars.
In some cases, subscription payments are so huge that they have supplanted revenue from ticket sales and other forms of income as the leagues’ largest source of revenue, the FCC said, citing Sports Business Journal and Sportico.
