Netflix said its coverage of two Christmas Day NFL games, the first ever by the streaming company, attracted more than 24 million viewers each, well above what the average pro football broadcast has delivered this season.
An early game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers averaged 24.1 million viewers, the company said Thursday in a statement. The later match between the Baltimore Ravens and Houston Texans, which featured a halftime performance by Beyoncé, drew 24.3 million and peaked at more than 27 million during her show.
Netflix said the two games set streaming records for the NFL. Through the 2024 season, the league has been averaging about 18 million viewers per broadcast, buoyed by simulcasts on online services like NBCUniversal’s Peacock. About a 10th of the NFL’s audience comes from streaming, according to Sportico.
Netflix was able to corral teams that are all playoff bound and were likely to draw large audiences for its first-ever NFL games. Yet neither match was close, and the audience typically falls off later in the game during a blowout. The Chiefs beat the Steelers 29-10 while the Ravens trounced the Texans 31-2.
The highlight of the day was the performance by Beyonce, which earned rave reviews from the press and fans online. This was the first time she performed several songs from her most recent album, Cowboy Carter.
Once a company that eschewed live broadcasts, Netflix is pushing hard into sports and other live events. The company doled out $150 million for the two NFL matches, part of a three-season deal, as it looks to attract more advertisers to its lower-priced, ad-supported offering. It finished the third quarter with 282.7 million subscribers.
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In November, the company aired a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul that drew a massive global audience of 60 million households or more than 108 million viewers, according to the company. Seen as an early test of the company’s live-coverage capabilities, the show drew thousands of complaints from viewers about connection problems and frozen screens.
“We crashed the site,” Paul said after claiming victory over the 58-year-old Tyson. “This is the biggest event.”
At a media event earlier in December, Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria said company engineers moved quickly to address the problem and try to prevent it from happening again.
“You don’t know, and you can’t learn these things until you do them,” she said. “We’ve obviously done a lot to learn and get ready for the NFL.
Any technical glitches on Christmas Day were minor compared with the fight. Produced by CBS Sports, the NFL games featured announcing talent on and off the field as well as superstar Mariah Carey, who opened the show with her holiday single “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Netflix promoted the games heavily, with a blimp flying over seven cities in the month leading up to Christmas, starting and ending in Houston with stops in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Nashville and Dallas. The company also dispatched food trucks to NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAAF games in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta offering hot chocolate and prizes, including tickets to the NFL Christmas Day Games and a year of Netflix free.
Stars from upcoming Netflix features, including Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, helped promote the games in the days leading up to the event. Netflix used the games to promote its upcoming programs, including new seasons of Squid Game and The Night Agent.
Christmas Day was big for TV sports all around. NBA games on Walt Disney Co.’s ABC and ESPN outlets delivered their biggest TV audience in five years, with all five games averaging 5.25 million viewers and showing increases from the year before.
The Los Angeles Lakers’ 115-113 victory over the Golden State Warriors was the most-watched, the league said, with an average audience of 7.76 million viewers.