The National Football League is going on offense as regulators from the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission are scrutinizing the company’s practices and media rights strategy and how sports’ shift to streaming is impacting consumers.
NFL executives Ted Ullyot, Hans Schroeder and Jeff Miller met with FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s chief of staff Greg Watson and attorney advisor Allison Howell, as well as the FCC Media Bureau’s Deputy Bureau Chief Evan Morris on April 17 to discuss its distribution approach for its live games and how it benefits fans and local broadcasters.
“Since its founding, the NFL has strived to put its fans at the center of everything we do. Nowhere is that more evident than in the NFL’s media distribution strategy, which for more than 50 years has served as a foundation and catalyst for the League’s growth and popularity,” the league wrote in a Tuesday letter. “While nothing can replace the excitement of attending a game, the vast majority of fans rely on this media distribution model to watch live games and follow the sport they love.”
The league noted that it has relied on free, over-the-air broadcast television as the primary means of distributing its games to over 200 million fans in the U.S.
“For many years, 100% of NFL games have aired on broadcast television in the home markets of the competing teams. Most of those games are distributed to a significantly broader geographic area, if not nationally,” the letter continues. “Our
contracts with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC account for the distribution of more than 87% of all NFL games, a number that has varied little in the past two decades. This distribution model is good for our fans, for local television broadcasters, for our 32 clubs in small and large markets alike, and for the competitiveness of the game itself. The success of our fan- and broadcast-friendly strategy is evident as the 2025 season was the most viewed since 1989 and one of the most competitive in League history.”
The NFL also defended its antitrust exemption under the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act that allows it to negotiate media rights for all of its affiliated teams. It argued that having 32 teams negotiate their own rights deals individually would result in more viewer confusion and higher costs.
In addition to the letter, the NFL shared a presentation with the FCC detailing how traditional TV consumption has fallen from 77% in 2015 to 47% in 2025, while streaming consumption has climbed from 23% to 53% over the same period. During that time, the number of pay TV households has fallen from 99 million to 65 million, per the presentation. Despite these trends, it noted that 86 of the top 100 TV programs in 2025 were NFL games.
The NFL has an opt-out clause in its current media rights agreements that can be exercised starting after the 2029-30 season, but could potentially reopen negotiations as early as this year. The league’s current partners include Disney/ESPN, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Paramount/CBS, Amazon and Fox. It also has separate deals with YouTube for the NFL Sunday Ticket and Netflix for Christmas Day games.
The NFL and CBS are currently in renewal talks. Paramount CEO David Ellison declined to comment on specific negotiations, but previously told CNBC that Paramount has “planned accordingly” in the event of a potential increase in the overall cost of the NFL by as much as 50%.
According to the presentation, Amazon’s Thursday Night Football saw a 16% year over year ratings increase to 15.4 million average viewers in 2025. It notes that Prime Video has roughly 180 million subscribers. Meanwhile, CBS’ Sunday package grew 11% to 21.3 million average viewers, Fox’s Sunday package grew 6% to 19.6 million viewers, NBC’s Sunday Night Football grew 11% to 23.5 million viewers, ESPN’s Monday Night Football grew 13% to 16.5 million viewers and the NFL Network grew o.1% to 7.6 million viewers.
It also notes that Netflix has roughly 85 million subscribers in the U.S., while YouTube has roughly 255 million monthly active users in the U.S. Netflix’s NFL games averaged 23.7 million U.S. viewers in 2025, while YouTube’s averaged 18.5 million U.S. viewers.
How Streaming Expands Sports Fandom
The FCC meeting comes as final replies for the regulator’s public comment period were due April 13 and after the DOJ opened an investigation into whether the league’s practices are anticompetitive.
In its original notice, the FCC argued that NFL games aired on 10 different services in 2025, which could cost a consumer over $1,500 to watch everything. It added that 20 NFL regular season games and one playoff game were nationally distributed, exclusively, on four different streaming services—Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Peacock and Netflix.
In an interview with CNBC, Carr suggested that the NFL could put its antitrust exemption at risk by moving too many games to streaming.
“I do think there’s a point at which the NFL reaches a tipping point where they’re sticking too many games behind a paywall, in which case it really raises a lot of questions about the scope of that [exemption],” Carr said. ” The DOJ and Congress could also look at the antitrust exemption. We want to be informed about this because we ultimately do regulate the local broadcast TV market, so we’re going to look at it and potentially we could inform Congress or the DOJ as well.”
