WASHINGTON—Faced with increased pressure from Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the ongoing shift of major sports rights to streaming, the NFL has told the FCC that its current policy of distributing media rights “benefits fans and local broadcasters in many ways” and that attempts to end league’s antitrust exemption would mean “higher costs and confusion” for consumers.
During an April 17 meeting with Greg Watson (Chief of Staff to Chairman Carr), Allison Howell (Attorney Advisor to Chairman Carr), and Evan Morris (Deputy Bureau Chief of the Media Bureau), the NFL presented an extensive slide deck showing that most games continue to be available to broadcasters even though major streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix have acquired packages of games in recent years.
“For many years, 100% of NFL games have aired on broadcast television in the home markets of the competing teams,” the NFL said in a letter to the FCC describing the meeting. “Most of those games are distributed to a significantly broader geographic area, if not nationally. Our contracts with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC account for the distribution of more than 87% of all NFL games, a number that has varied little in the past two decades. This distribution model is good for our fans, for local television broadcasters, for our 32 clubs in small and large markets alike, and for the competitiveness of the game itself. The success of our fan- and broadcast-friendly strategy is evident as the 2025 season was the most viewed since 1989 and one of the most competitive in League history.”
The NFL's comments come in response to an FCC Public Notice seeking comments on the current state of sports rights and the ongoing shift of rights to streaming services.
In response the NAB and other broadcasters have suggested that Congress and the FCC need to act to preserve free access to games and that the ongoing shift of games to streaming services had raised costs and created a great deal of confusion for consumers.
“In 2025, NFL games appeared on 10 different paywalled platforms, and the cost of the subscriptions necessary to watch every NFL game approached $1,500,” associations representing the big four network affiliates noted in their comments to the FCC. “These developments threaten to get worse because streaming platforms owned by Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and the like have nearly limitless budgets and face no regulations that would check their growth. Indeed, they are already increasingly outbidding Big 4 Networks for major sports rights and cutting local broadcasting out of the picture entirely.”
To address that problem, both the NAB and others have suggested that the antitrust exemption given to the NFL and other major leagues should be reexamined. That antitrust exemption allows the NFL, NBA, and MLB to negotiate deals for all the teams in the league.
If that exemption was removed the NFL said that it would mean higher costs and more confusion for consumers trying to find the games because it would produce a situation where 32 teams negotiate their own deals with dozens of potential outlets. This would create “32x the fractured media landscape” and “higher consumer costs”
In interviews and posts, FCC Chair Brendan Carr has complained that watching sports “has become frustrating over the last several years."
In a March interview with Fox News Carr said, “It's more complex, it's more costly. You effectively have to have a computer science degree to decipher this. As you noted, people have to sign up for Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and Google. It's very, very difficult these days, but historically, broadcast TV and sports leagues have had a great and mutually beneficial relationship."
“We’re at a point now where I think some of these leagues are at a tipping point where they're going to push this issue so far and start to lose their antitrust exemption,” he added. “We’re all for sports leagues getting fair market value for their product, but right now, they're benefiting from a very unique antitrust exemption to pool their bargaining together, but...we're at a tipping point where these leagues can push it so far putting games behind paywalls that they undermine their ability to claim that antitrust exemption.”
Efforts to regulate sports rights are also ramping up in Washington. Front Office Sports reports that the FCC probe into the issue is one of at least four major legislative and regulatory efforts seeking to address the issue.
The complete NFL presentation and slide deck that was given to the FCC can be found here.
