The National Football League is once again looking to add new broadcast windows this coming season, including a possible game on Thanksgiving Eve.
The NFL, of course, has multiple games on Thanksgiving itself, and in recent years launched a Black Friday game with Amazon. But the day before Thanksgiving would be a new window for the league, so it is exploring the move.
“Every offseason we look for new opportunities to best serve our fans in the schedule-making process,” an NFL spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter. “As Commissioner Goodell has said, Thanksgiving and NFL football have become synonymous and given the continued growth of fan interest around our games on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, looking for additional opportunities tied to this special holiday is exciting for us to explore.”
A source notes that the league has had success with the Thanksgiving and Black Friday games, as well as the Christmas Day games on Netflix, so adding another game around the holidays makes sense. The league is also said to be considering other new windows as well.
The NFL, of course, is the king of TV, with its games dominating the ratings charts and entrenched as must-have programming for both traditional media companies and tech giants. The league has been opportunistic in adding more windows and games in recent years, and its recent investment in ESPN gives it even more flexibility to do so, with the league getting back a handful of games that had been on NFL Network.
But the league’s rights partners are also bracing for early renewal talks with the league, which has an opt-out clause in a couple of years. The NBA’s recent media deals, however, reset the price for top-tier sporting events, and the NFL will be poised to benefit.
Some of those media partners are already beginning to game out where they might trim budgets if their NFL fees rise in the next year or two.
Still, there will likely be no shortage of bidders for a Thanksgiving Eve game or any other new windows the league experiments with (assuming the game is put on the market and not bundled with an existing package), given the streaming needs of its traditional media partners, and the interest in sports from digital native companies like YouTube, Amazon and Netflix.
