NEW YORK — By measures cited by the NFL, viewership of the 2016 season could be seen as being better than ever.
The NFL on Wednesday released an information guide noting that the 2016 regular season reached 204 million unique viewers, representing 77 percent of all television homes and 68 percent of potential viewers in the U.S., with household ratings on each NFL broadcast partners continuing to outpace all other programming.
In citing the Nielsen Company, the NFL said 199 million people tuned into the 2015 NFL regular season, representing 78 percent of all television homes and 67 percent of potential viewers in the U.S.
NFL COO Tod Leiweke noted last week at the National Sports Forum Summer Summit that as television ratings went down early in the 2016 season, “There was a pretty crazy election going on” and added that ratings continued to change “with the drama that’s playing out in Washington D.C.”
“Having said that, we had more people watching NFL this year than ever before — mobile devices, Twitter, we did a deal this year with Amazon,” Leiweke said. “But tried and true are our network partners, and part of the great popularity of the NFL is through having games on free TV. And you know, you say, ‘oh, everyone has cable.’ You know, even in the heyday of cable, there were significant homes that didn’t, and the NFL was there on free, and it was self-fulfilling prophecy. We built the largest broadcast ratings in America in large part because of the partnerships with the networks, and I think that continues on.”
It was timely that Leiweke spoke out in support of the NFL’s network partners while indicating the league was looking to attract consumers who have been changing the way they watch games. His comments came the morning after the date of the J.D. Power Fan Experience Study that found 27 percent of the 9,200 sports fan respondents to the survey had indicated that their NFL viewership increased in the 2016-17 season, with only 12 percent saying their viewership decreased.
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According to the NFL, regular season games in 2016 averaged 16.6 million viewers per game telecast, and the league added a bit onto that with a “tri-cast” distribution model that combined the power of network TV partners with social media streaming. Ten Thursday Night Football games could be seen on either NBC or CBS in addition to NFL Network and Twitter. Viewership of those streams on Twitter generated more than 3.5 million unique viewers on average per game for fans who had 50 percent of the game in view on their screens for at least two seconds — not huge numbers, but a younger audience was attracted to watch.
This season, the NFL will stream those Thursday Night Football games for users of the Amazon Prime Video app instead of those using Twitter. Instead of both logged-in and logged-out Twitter users streaming the games for free, they will be behind a paywall. The 57-year-old Leiweke did note that his own household consisted of Amazon Prime members.
“It’s going to be fascinating to see,” Leiweke said of streaming on Amazon. “It’s not an overwhelming part, but it’s for us the opportunity to pioneer and see what’s out there. Our deal with Twitter last year was really interesting. We live streamed games on Twitter, and that was very ambitious to make sure that the games could live stream and that there was a good experience for the fans.
“We have the opportunity to pioneer and test with technologies, but I remain also as we’ve said very loyal to our current partners because they’ve done such a magnificent job of helping us make the league what it is with innovations, and how they cover the game, it’s just amazing. And I think that our partners today have been responsible for the massive fanbase we have.”
To Leiweke, even as the NFL continues to conduct tests to see how future NFL fans will consume content, it still comes down to football being a game that attracts fans to watch.
“Virtual reality, augmented, it’s really interesting, but there’s this other reality called the game,” he said. “And I think that all of those things will help and complement, but I think at the end of the day, the drama of the game still carries the weight. And that’s the great thing about our sport is that we don’t have to create virtual reality. We have unbelievable, awesome reality on every Sunday.”