Peacock adds first streaming-exclusive NFL playoff game

Big sports fans are going to have to pay up for Peacock.

The NFL and NBCUniversal jointly announced Monday that beginning next season there will be a playoff game airing exclusively on the Peacock streaming platform.

The Wall Street Journal reported the deal is “in the range” of $110 million.

Peacock already broadcasts WWE’s premium live events, a weekly MLB game and English Premier League games.

This coming season, Peacock will also be airing eight exclusive Big Ten football games, and up to 47 men’s basketball games and 30 women’s basketball games from the conference.

The deal is perhaps the most risky in NFL history in terms of compromising reach, which the league has prioritized more than any other professional sports entity, and been rewarded richly for it — last year, 82 of the 100 most watched programs on all of TV were NFL games.

A vast majority of NFL programming is available on broadcast TV — Fox, CBS, NBC or ABC.

Meanwhile, “Monday Night Football” is on ESPN, which is in about 75 million homes, and “Thursday Night Football” is on Amazon’s Prime Video; there are about 150 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States.

The least-watched NFL Wild Card game this past season was Chargers-Jaguars, and that still averaged over 20 million viewers.

Peacock, as of January, was in about 17 million homes, and this number is likely to go down at least a little bit in June when the streaming service is no longer free to Comcast’s Xfinity customers.

Nonetheless, the deal represents the modern era where live sports rights are sliced and diced between linear TV and streaming services.

“We are thrilled to partner with the NFL on this industry milestone, bringing to Peacock the first ever exclusively live streamed NFL Playoff game,” NBC Sports Chairman Pete Bevacqua said in a statement.

“With America’s No. 1 primetime show for a record 12 consecutive years, the terrific regular season SNF schedule revealed last week, and today’s announcement, we can’t wait for the 2023 season to kick off.”

“We are excited to work with a great partner in Peacock to present the first-ever exclusively live streamed NFL playoff game this upcoming season,” said NFL EVP and NFL Media COO Hans Schroeder.

“Expanding the digital distribution of NFL content while maintaining wide reach for our games continues to be a key priority for the League, and bringing the excitement of an NFL playoff game exclusively to Peacock’s streaming platform is the next step in that strategy.”

As with every other NFL game, the postseason matchup will still air on broadcast TV in local markets.