Welcome to the latest installment of Dan Rayburn's Streaming Insights & Intelligence, a weekly insights column on StreamTV Insider where the industry analyst puts facts and figures to the news you need to know about. Join the discussion on LinkedIn and check back each week as he recaps key industry happenings.
For the week of January 8, 2025, Rayburn is tracking stats related to Netflix as the SVOD makes a live sports push.
Final viewership numbers are out for the NFL's Christmas day games, with an AMA of 31.3 million global viewership for the Ravens-Texans game, with 24.3 million coming from the US.
The number includes Netflix's stream, CBS local market viewing and NFL+ mobile viewing from NFL. While many will want to compare these numbers to the streaming of previous NFL games, it's hard to make a fair comparison.
The numbers reported take Nielsen's Live Streaming Measurement service and Netflix's first-party streaming data to measure viewership. AMA viewership figures are based on National Live + SD from Nielsen in the US, which includes out-of-home viewing, CBS local market viewing, NFL+, and mobile and web viewing across Netflix. International data is based on 1st party Netflix Live + 1 data for TV, mobile and web, along with NFL reported viewing for the NFL’s international distributors and NFL Game Pass outside of the US.
- With Netflix securing the exclusive U.S. rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031, here's a breakdown of previous TV and streaming viewership in 2023, 2019 and 2015.
⚽ In 2023, the Women’s World Cup stage match, in which the United States tied with the Netherlands, averaged 6.4 million viewers on FOX. It was the most-watched game in 2023 since the U.S. Women's Team was knocked out in round 16, resulting in the World Cup Final averaging 2.2 million viewers across FOX, Telemundo, Universo and Peacock.
⚽ In 2019, the Women’s World Cup final, in which the United States beat the Netherlands, drew 13.9 million viewers on FOX and had 289,000 viewers streaming the game (AMA). Telemundo added 1.6 million viewers.
⚽ In 2015, the Women’s World Cup final, in which the United States beat Japan, averaged 16 million viewers on FOX, peaked at 23 million and had 72,000 viewers streaming the game (AMA). Telemundo added 1.2 million viewers.
Due to the different locations of the tournament, viewership is impacted by the start times. The 2023 final started at 6am ET, the 2019 final started at 11am ET, and the 2015 final began at 7pm ET.
Netflix has secured the exclusive U.S. rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031 and will include English and Spanish telecasts. The 32-team, 64-game tournament in 2027 will be played in July in Brazil.
Some have suggested that with Netflix's exclusive deal for the U.S. broadcast rights moving from TV to streaming, FIFA and U.S. Soccer risk losing an American audience. However, when looking at the subscriber numbers of the two, I don't see how they came to that conclusion.
At the end of the third quarter of 2024, Netflix had 66.7 million paid subscribers in the U.S. At the end of 2024, it is estimated that there will be 65-70 million pay TV households in the U.S. At the current cord-cutting rate, Netflix will have more U.S. subscribers than pay TV by 2027.
We don't know how much Netflix paid for the rights, but the BBC said they paid £9 million in 2023 to share the rights in the UK with ITV.
Last year, FIFA’s chief partnerships and media officer threatened not to broadcast the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the big five European countries, saying the bids were too low and "unacceptable." Months later, the international soccer federation announced that it had agreed to extend its partnership with the European Broadcasting Union, enabling the tournament to be shown across EBU’s free-to-air-linear network across 34 European territories. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
Dan Rayburn is an analyst in the streaming media industry, with regular TV appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Schwab Network amongst others. He is conference Chairman for the NAB Show Streaming Summit in Las Vegas each year, and his streamingmediablog.com website is one of the most widely read sites for broadcasters, content owners, OTT providers, Wall Street money managers, and industry executives. He also has a podcast at danrayburnpodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected]
Dan Rayburn’s Streaming Insights & Intelligence is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.