Hogs may not get slaughtered, but they could lose their broadcast antitrust exemption.
The NFL’s ongoing pivot from broadcast TV to streaming could have potentially significant ramifications, according to FCC chair Brendan Carr.
“Does the NFL still benefit from the antitrust exemption when they’re negotiating for carriage of games not on a sponsored telecast, but on a streaming service?” Carr said Thursday, via Rohan Goswami of Semafor. “That’s a very live, very ripe question.”
It’s been ripening, frankly, from the moment the NFL did its first cable-only deal in the 1980s. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 arguably contemplates an antitrust exemption for over-the-air telecasts only. Cable, satellite, and/or streamer possibly don’t fall within the scope of the exemption that lets the NFL sell rights to games in an all-teams-or-no-teams grouping.
To date, the NFL hasn’t faced a challenge to the question of whether the exemption applies to paid platforms. Carr said Thursday that there’s “a point at which you sort of tip the scale, and they’ve just put too many games behind a paywall, and then that whole exemption collapses.”
The timing of the comments becomes relevant to the current dynamics of the league’s TV packages. The NFL is negotiating with CBS to extend deals that can be scrapped after the 2029 season, at a significant increase over the $2.1 billion per year CBS already agreed to pay. If, as expected, the NFL moves from CBS to other networks, the unspoken “or else” could be moving entire packages to streaming.
The league has already shifted to streaming with Thursday night games. Some think Amazon could swap its Thursday package for Sunday nights, with NBC moving to Thursdays. The theory is that more people will pay for Prime if it’s the only way to cap the traditional NFL football day with a prime-time game.
Regardless, there’s a tipping point. Especially since it can be argued that the NFL has already loaded up the scale by using the antitrust exemption to sell league-wide packages to providers that don’t provide the games to consumers for free.
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