National Football League On Television

National Football League On Television

The television rights to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games are the most lucrative and expensive rights of any American sport. It was television that brought professional football into prominence in the modern era after World War II. Since then, NFL broadcasts have become among the most-watched programs on American television, and the financial fortunes of entire networks have rested on owning NFL broadcasting rights. This has raised questions about the impartiality of the networks' coverage of games and whether they can criticize the NFL without fear of losing the rights and their income.

Since the 1960s, all regular season and playoff games broadcast in the United States have been aired by national television networks. Currently, the terrestrial television networks CBS ($3.73B), NBC ($3.6B) and Fox ($4.27B) — as well as cable television's ESPN ($8.8B) — are paying a combined total of US$20.4 billion to broadcast NFL games as per the current contract that ends in 2013. From 2014 to 2022, the same networks will pay $39.6 billion for the same broadcast rights. With the current concentration of media ownership in the U.S., the NFL thus holds broadcast contracts with four companies (CBS Corporation, NBCUniversal, News Corporation, and The Walt Disney Company, respectively) that control a combined vast majority of the country's media. League-owned NFL Network, on cable television, also broadcasts a selected number of games nationally. However, the league imposes several strict television policies to ensure that stadiums are filled and sold out, to maximize telecast ratings, and to help leverage content on these networks.

Under the current contracts, regionally shown games on Sunday afternoons are televised on CBS and Fox, which primarily carry games of AFC and NFC teams respectively (the conference of the road team determines the broadcaster of an interconference game). Nationally televised regular season games on Sunday and Monday nights are aired on NBC and ESPN, respectively, while the NFL Network televises Thursday night games during the regular season. During the postseason, NBC broadcasts the first two playoff games, while CBS and Fox airs the rest of the AFC and NFC games, respectively; the Super Bowl rotates annually between CBS, Fox, and NBC.

NFL preseason telecasts are more in line with the other major sports leagues' regular-season telecasts in that they are more locally-produced, usually by a local affiliate of one of the above terrestrial television networks. Some preseason games will air nationally, however.