Plucking the Peacock
Will streaming fatigue undermine Saturday's Chiefs-Dolphins playoff game? I hope so.
With the holidays behind us and bad weather socking in a significant fraction of the country this weekend, much of America will be parking itself in front of their televisions to watch the opening round of the National Football League playoffs.
There are six games on the schedule stretching from Saturday afternoon to Monday night. But there’s a new wrinkle this year. After decades of offering the NFL playoffs over free, over the air television, one playoff game on Saturday night featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins will only be available by subscription on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.1
As I outlined last June, I refuse to pay for Peacock on principle. It was on Father’s Day that I saw my frustrated father-in-law reduced to listening to the Baltimore Orioles on the radio because their Sunday afternoon game was being carried on Peacock instead of MASN, the regional sports network that the team owns. Paying for one streaming service is more than enough, and Major League Baseball should be ashamed for soaking their fans like this and so should the NFL.
I don’t think you should pay for Peacock either. But instead of simply appealing to your emotions, I’ll also appeal to your reason, because as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to Saturday’s playoff game, NBC and the NFL are asking fans not only to pay for a product that was once free, but one that is worth considerably less than it was in the past, never mind the fact that they’re going to inconvenience you for the privilege.
Let’s turn the clock back to 1970, the first season after the AFL-NFL merger that created the modern NFL. Before the merger there were 10 teams in the AFL in two five-team divisions and 16 teams in the NFL, aligned into two conferences that contained two divisions of four teams each. Both leagues played a 14-game schedule.
In order to balance the two conferences, three NFL franchises (Pittsburgh Steelers, Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts) agreed to join the former AFL clubs in the newly formed American Football Conference. The 13 remaining NFL clubs comprised the National Football Conference. Each conference was aligned into three divisions, East, Central and West, with the eastern divisions in both conference having five teams, while the central and west divisions had just four.2
The playoff format was simple. After playing a 14-game schedule, three spots were reserved for the respective division champions in each conference. A fourth spot in each conference was awarded to a “wild card” team, the second place team out of any division with the best record. The entire postseason tournament consisted of just seven games: four on the first weekend; the conference championships on the second; and after a one-week break, Super Bowl V on January 17, 1971.
And all of the games were available on free, over the air television.
In the ensuing 53 years, the wild success of professional football, fueled by seemingly insatiable demand for the game, has led the league to add teams, add more games to the regular season schedule and to expand the playoff field.3 The NFL now has 32 teams. The regular season is 17 games spread out over 18 weeks. 14 teams qualify for the playoffs, a tournament consisting of 13 games over five weekends culminating in a Super Bowl that has now creeped into the first weekend of February.
Until this season, all those games were still available on “free” over the air television. That’s something of a misnomer now given that most Americans are watching those local network affiliates on cable, satellite or streaming services that they already pay for. And of course, virtually every team plays in a stadium subsidized by taxpayers.
Next, let’s do some very basic math. In 1970, eight teams out of 26 qualified for the playoffs, a little less than one-third or about 30%. Today, 14 teams out of 32 make the postseason field, almost 44%. That means that an individual playoff spot is worth more than 10% less than in was in 1970. What’s worse, the expansion of the tournament from seven to 13 games means that each playoff contest is about half as important as it was in the first post merger NFL season.
Don’t believe me? Most Americans have trouble remembering who won the Super Bowl last year, never mind who might have played in an opening round playoff game.
You don’t have to be a devotee of Milton Friedman to see that playoff expansion looks a lot like monetary inflation.4 Conversely, Americans love football more than any other type of television programming. There’s more demand, so the league increased supply at the current “perceived” price — remember, NFL games seem free, but they really aren’t — in order to meet it. It seems like simple market dynamics are at work.
Which brings us to Peacock. If you live in Miami or Kansas City metropolitan area, your local NBC affiliate will carry the Dolphins-Chiefs game. If NBC hadn’t made that accommodation, you can be sure that the six U.S. Senators that represent Florida, Kansas and Missouri would have expressed their displeasure to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. As for the rest of us, we’ll have to pay $5.99/month or $59.99/year for a subscription. An ad-free tier will cost an additional $6.00/month or $60.00/year, all on top of what you pay for your current cable/satellite/streaming service.
And of course, while you might intend to cancel your Peacock subscription after a single month just to watch the game, the folks at NBC will more than likely make it difficult for you to do so in hopes that you might forget and keep paying. After all, we all know how easy cable, satellite and streaming companies make it to cancel.
In isolation, paying an additional $5.99 might not seem like much, and I’m sure America’s oligarchs are laughing at anyone who might deign to complain. But as my grade school math skills have demonstrated, the product they’re selling — which isn’t free anymore— isn’t as valuable as it once was. What’s worse, they’re throwing an extra obstacle in your way — obtaining a Peacock subscription — in a transaction that was virtually frictionless.5
Altogether, that looks like a lousy deal to me. Keep that $5.99 in your pocket, as I’m sure you can find something more useful to do with it. After all, you’re not just a fan, you’re a customer. And while NBC can put a price on this game, the customer is the ultimate arbiter of what it’s really worth. Better still, if enough people balk at this terrible deal, it’ll help teach the suits at NBC a lesson that they’ll never forget.
No, I will not link to their website to help anyone sign up for that service.
When the NFL added the Houston Texans in time for the 2002 season, it decided to re-align into four divisions per conference. For some reason, they added North and South divisions in each conference, while retiring the Central divisions. That was a mistake. That division in both conference had a distinct blue collar character that was earned over the decades. They should have kept it in lieu of adding the North division.
The playoff format has been updated many other times over the ensuing decades. For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to compare the original format with the way it looks today.
To match the equivalent purchasing power of $1 in 1970 you would need $7.94 today, an almost eight-fold decrease in value and an effective inflation rate of over 693%.
Streaming companies pull all sorts of dirty tricks to steer you to content that they own or distribute over what you might choose yourself. For instance, I subscribe to ESPN+ so I can watch out of town NHL games in addition to the hometown Washington Capitals. Yet on nights when the Caps play, I’m reduced to playing hunt and find for the Monumental Sports broadcast, as Hulu lists all of the ESPN+ games more prominently, even in a list of NHL games. It’s insidious, aggravating and makes me miss NHL Center Ice, the service the league used to provide and one that I was more than happy to pay for. But now it’s clear that the broadcast television people — a group who seem to be wedded to 20th century business practices — are more than happy to treat me like a human battery hooked to the Matrix.
Yes a money grab and pure greed. Moreover there are a lot more rural Americans than apparently the jerks don’t realize. Streaming and a decent internet connection (not to mention a “smart TV”)is easier in “developing countries” (fka: 3rd world). So if you chose or happenstance put you in a LOT of rural areas, you can just kiss the Dolphins/Chiefs playoff game goodbye or hope you don’t know the outcome and watch an NFL network replay (just don’t accidentally glance at the bottom banner, so you can still be surprised)…I thought Goodell and the NFL actually started giving a rip about “the rest of us”. Obviously I was wrong. And the 1.1 mil Peacock and the NFL decided on is chump change…. I guess the NFL and Peacock agree rural Americans are idiots. How sad!
This is a pure money grab by NBC and I hope they fail.