NFL Christmas Day Games Will Be “Netflix-ified”, Streamer’s Co-CEO Greg Peters Teases; Company Would “Love To” Have Major Sports Rights If Math Works

deadline.com:

Netflix plans to add signature flourishes to its live broadcasts of two Christmas Day NFL games, but remains circumspect about paying billions for major sports rights.

That was the view from Co-CEO Greg Peters, who covered sports, advertising and a couple of other topics in a 25-minute appearance Friday at the FT Business of Entertainment Summit. “We look at the two Christmas Day NFL games as more like an event kind of thing, where for one day football will be on Netflix,” Peters said. “Hopefully, those will be amazing games and we’ll all be talking about what’s going on there.

And we plan to ‘Netflix-ify’ them a little bit, so we’ll plan to have a little bit of stuff around the games with our talent and stuff like that that will hopefully make it super-fun.” As enthusiastic as the company is about sports (as evidenced by ongoing investments in unscripted properties like Drive to Survive, Full Swing and many others, top execs have concerns about making the math work. “Having Thursday Night Football or the NBA or things like that, we’d love to do those things.

It would be amazing,” Peters said. “We also want to do it in a way that works for the business and those have been typically challenging deals to go and do and make it work for the business.” With the three-year NFL Christmas pact, the acquisition of WWE Raw and the 2023 debut of its own self-produced live golf event, “certainly we’re poking at the edges” of a full-scale live sports component, Peters acknowledged. “Maybe we’ll figure out a way but we haven’t figured out a way yet.” With most major rights locked up for several more years, “there’s not really the opportunity for quite some time,” he noted.