“We finished last season in the playoffs with Peacock,” Schroeder said. “To open this season, open Week 1 off a Thursday night game on NBC and have them be able to promote to their Peacock platform to Friday night seemed like a great way to start the season and continue to build a key partner and platform in Peacock and NBC in a really appropriate way.”
Beyond ratings, streaming is also giving the NFL a unique audience reach, with Schroeder calling it a “key evolution” moving forward.
“It’s a little over eight years younger than what we see on broadcast. They’re watching longer,” Schroeder said. “The Peacock game was our youngest audience for a playoff game in 10 years and was the most female of any Wild Card or divisional audience we’ve ever had.”
Swift rise in ratings
And though the Taylor Swift Effect has been credited with helping to bring in more women viewers—as Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce competed in the Peacock Wild Card game—Schroeder noted it wasn’t a factor in deciding on this year’s streaming exclusives.
“It did not matter at all. We had the highest viewed season in our history by female fans,” Schroeder said. “There’s no doubt that for some of the Chiefs games Taylor provided a lift, but you have to remember the Chiefs are only 17 of 272 games, and we saw so many other increases across the year.”
Overall, the NFL regular-season games averaged 17.9 million viewers in 2023, which is tied for the second-highest season average since ratings tracking began in the mid-’90s.
In addition to Swift, Schroeder pointed to a number of factors that boosted viewership in 2023, including the second time the Super Bowl was on a Spanish-language broadcaster with TelevisaUnivision’s telecast, new distribution through YouTube for Sunday Ticket and the league’s media mix across new platforms, including its Black Friday game on Prime Video.
“We played on Black Friday, and I think we really liked that. It’s the first time doing that, and we would expect to continue to play then,” Schroeder said. “We think it’s going to be another key part of Thanksgiving weekend, and we’re excited about how we can build that with Amazon going forward.”
