Buying NFL Ads is Now Easier Than Watching the NFL

NFL Rights Wars

In a recent Prof G Markets post, I had the infrequent joy of one of my favorite business thought leaders and his team sound off on the industry I work in - advertising. They often share their thoughts on the business, TV rights, holding company activity, cable giant and media conglomerate shenanigans, and consumer trends. In this post in particular, however, Scott Galloway's Markets co-host, Ed Elson, commented on the shifting sands in NFL property rights, specifically Disney giving the NFL a 10% stake in ESPN.

The article notes, "In exchange [for the 10% stake], ESPN takes control of NFL Network, NFL RedZone, the league’s fantasy platform, and rights to three additional games per season, bringing its total to 28. The deal comes just ahead of ESPN’s $29.99/month streaming launch this month." Perhaps more importantly, however, is Ed's editorial "Take" at the end of the Disney NFL news.

Ed states, "The real losers in this deal are the football fans. To watch every game in the 2025 NFL season without cable, you’d need subscriptions to at least half a dozen streaming services and YouTube TV. Which will run you up to $1,500 — and that was before this deal. After this deal, it’ll be even more. Now you might say, “Well why wouldn’t I just watch the whole season on cable?” And the answer to that question is: You can’t. Because Amazon now owns the rights to Thursday night football, and Netflix also has the rights to select games. So if you’re a serious football fan, you have to stream, and streaming just got even more expensive."

And?

This observation is novel to precisely zero NFL fans. To recap, as of right now, to watch EVERY NFL game, which used to be possible with a cable NFL Sunday Ticket Plan, viewers must subscribe to a cable or vMVPD plan (like Fubo, YouTube TV) WITH expanded NFL Sunday Ticket for all in-and-out-of-market Sunday games and Monday Night Football on EPSN, Amazon Prime for Thursday Night Football, and Netflix for Christmas Day games. As Ed unoriginally pointed out, the formerly straightforward endeavor of watching the top programming in all of TV and America's favorite sport has become an expensive and inconvenient burden for viewers.

For the last few seasons, I have subscribed to a YouTube TV account to watch in-market football games. I'm not a big enough fan to subscribe to a Sunday Ticket for out-of-market games. Since my famiily has an Amazon Prime membership, we get to watch Thursday Night Games via Prime Video. However, we had an issue last night trying to watch the season opener between the Eagles and the Cowboys, as NBC has rights to the first game of the season. Upon opening the Prime Video app on our LG Smart TV last night, the in-app hero thumbnail for the game was displayed front and center with a subtext caveat, "Sign up for a free trial with Peacock Premium to watch". Peacock Premium? In Prime Video? For Thursday Night Football? Are we serious? I'm used to having to sign up for say, HBO Max, to watch an HBO show via Prime Video and not setup another app on the Smart TV, which I think is actually a good user experience trait that Prime Video offers. But I couldn't watch TNF on Prime Video alone and had to sign up for the Peacock Premium free trial. Don't worry, I set a reminder in my calendar to cancel in six days, which highlights another glaring threat to streaming platforms, users cancelling subscriptions after finishing desired programs, but that's a topic for another post.

At least advertising is straightforward...at least moreso

Navigating NFL TV rights as an agency or advertiser in and of itself is as big a nightmare as watching if you try to negotiate with networks and streaming platforms yourself. I know what our planning teams go through each season as they build blueprints for our clients to be able to access every NFL game. Netflix's paid ad access is still murky, streaming live event ad serving is clunky, and the linear space is still stuck in the outdated RFP and Insertion Order past.

But my previous sentence on the work our teams do to aggregate and avail all possible NFL inventory is the real point here. We built a tool for ourselves to more easily organize and connect TV ad inventory and then realized that we should commercialize the platform itself. It's called OTIS and it's wildly impressive if you know anything about TV ad inventory, ad creative trafficking, and billing a multi-vendor buy. It's even more impressive when you realize that no one else in the industry has built a tool like it and made it available to advertisers to execute insanely complex multi-inventory, national, regional, and local TV buys, even in NFL programming.

As a viewer, you may not have access to a single platform that lets me watch every NFL game. But as an advertiser, you do, and it's called Continuum Sports. If you're tired of negotiating with broadcast stations, cable networks, and streaming platforms, there is a better way, and we'd love to help you access it all in one buy...at no cost (we operate on margins OTIS surfaces with our scale)...and get billed on one invoice. Viewers may be out of luck this season when it comes to watching NFL on one platform, but advertisers have an answer: Continuum Spots.

*ad caveat about Netflix access