On Saturday, the Chicago Bears beat the Inexperienced Bay Packers in an NFL playoff sport that had all the things: a bitter rivalry, an old-school outside environment, and a historic comeback (or choke-job, relying in your POV).
It additionally occurred to be a (largely) streaming-only sport. Did you discover? Or care?
I did not. Apart from about 30 seconds, once I was looking for out what community was displaying the sport, and it took me a beat to comprehend it was on Amazon’s Prime Video. Then I booted up my app and watched the sport with none challenge. Identical to every other NFL sport.
In 2026, “Man would not have an issue watching the Bears/Packers” is a real dog-bites-man story. However that is why I am writing about it right here: Not very way back, the concept of streaming a super-high-profile NFL sport — and requiring NFL followers to subscribe to a streaming service as a way to watch it — would have been a really huge deal.
Now it is a yawner: I used to be certainly one of 31.6 million individuals who watched the sport, the overwhelming majority of whom streamed it (followers in native markets may use broadcast TV). That is a streaming report for an NFL sport, and it is greater than another video games bought final weekend on standard TV.
And that tells you simply how far sports activities and streaming have come.
Flash again to 2013, as an example, and the concept of whether or not the “web” — a catch-all time period that included all the things wanted to get streaming video onto your display screen, from net servers to fiber-optic traces to the router in your home — may assist an enormous NFL sport watched by many tens of millions of individuals was an open query. “Why Web TV Skeptic Mark Cuban Thinks Google Can Make the NFL Work on the Web,” was an ungainly headline I tapped out on the time.
Again then, the NFL and different sports activities giants have been routinely streaming huge occasions just like the Tremendous Bowl and World Cup — however solely as a type of secondary outlet for weirdos who did not have conventional TV. And anybody who did stream sports activities needed to anticipate to run into issues, like ESPN did when it streamed a World Cup game in 2014.
A 12 months later, the NFL put on a streaming-only game for the first time — however made certain it was a comparatively area of interest one, and made certain that folks knew it was an experiment.
Minimize to in the present day, and streaming is only a method we watch some soccer video games now. Amazon pays a gazillion dollars a year to show one game a week through the common season; Netflix has paid up to show a couple games on Christmas Day. A brand new deal the NFL struck with Disney final 12 months will give the league the chance to promote much more video games to digital gamers.
And two years in the past, the league handed one other new threshold by shifting certainly one of its most beneficial property — a playoff sport — to Comcast’s Peacock streamer, the place it was only available to paid subscribers. That one generated a ton of complaints from individuals who mentioned they did not wish to pay one other service to observe an NFL sport — together with millions of sign-ups for Peacock, which confirmed they might.
The NFL will not be ditching TV for streaming anytime quickly. For many individuals, watching NFL games is the main reason to watch TV, and that offers the league a ton of leverage to extract ever-increasing charges from the likes of NBC and CBS. So they’ll virtually definitely hold the vast majority of their video games on old-time TV for the foreseeable future. However they will promote them to streaming platforms too — as a result of they will pay as much as get them, and you may pay, too.
