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Fox's new NFL Thursday Night Football deal highlights its new strategy by Kevin Tran on Feb 1, 2018, 9:58 AM Advertisement
 This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Digital Media Briefing" subscribers hours before appearing on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here. Fox signed a deal with the NFL to broadcast Thursday Night Football (TNF) games for the next five years, beginning with the 2018 season. Under the deal, Fox Sports will broadcast 11 games per season, which will also be shown on the NFL Network. The digital rights to Thursday Night Football, last streamed by Amazon, have not been acquired yet. Terms of Fox’s deal weren’t disclosed, but the network is reportedly paying $650 million per year for rights. This figure eclipses the cumulative $450 million NBC and CBS paid for TNF rights for the 2017 season. With the deal, Fox gains the rights to some of TV’s most-watched programming. The average viewership for an NFL game in 2017 was 14.8 million, and 37 of the top 50 most watched broadcasts in 2017 came from the NFL, according to Nielsen per Ad Age. The NFL still drew sizable audiences, even as ratings for Thursday Night Football were down 12% year-over-year (YoY) in 2017, while overall average NFL viewership declined 10% YoY. The NFL’s broader TV viewership dominance likely outweighed declining NFL viewership, and broader cord-cutting trends, in Fox’s decision to bid for the NFL rights. Fox’s acquisition of the rights highlights its new strategic direction: - The company can push further into becoming a sports broadcasting leader. One of the few assets 21st Century Fox kept with the $52.4 billion sale of the majority of its assets to Disney was Fox Sports. The Thursday Night NFL rights will help Fox Sports’ hone in on the football market, especially as the company already broadcasts NFL games on Sunday afternoons.
- The rights allow Fox to capitalize on lucrative Thursday Night Football ad spend.The cost of a 30-second ad on NBC’s TNF broadcasts increased 3.7% YoY to $524,000, while CBS’ TNF ad spots cost $496,300 on average, per Variety. Though this bodes well for Fox’s top line growth, it also increases the company’s reliance on NFL programming for ad revenue. With the new TNF rights, 40% of Fox’s gross ratings points — a metric advertisers use to help determine where to run ad campaigns — come from NFL games, per MoffetNathanson. The company will likely place a greater emphasis on acquiring rights to other professional sports leagues to remedy this issue.
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