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While it was already announced that Peacock would have an exclusive playoff game this NFL season, now NBCUniversal is announcing that it also has a regular season game that will be exclusive to Peacock.
The regular season game will be the Buffalo Bills versus the Los Angeles Chargers, which will be a primetime matchup on Saturday, December 23. The game will start at 8:30PM and will follow a SNF game on Saturday afternoon between the Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburgh Steelers on NBC.
The regular season game and playoff exclusive games will be broadcast on NBC stations in the two competing teams cities, and also available on mobile devices using NFL+. Which is a bit odd, since it’s not really “exclusive” to Peacock then.
This is a big move for the NFL
This is pretty big for the NFL, giving two games to a streamer as an exclusive for the first time. Of course, you can be rest assured that NBCUniversal paid handsomely for these two games from the NFL. Let’s just hope that the regular season game does better than the Thursday Night games did on Prime Video last season. It wasn’t so much that Prime Video couldn’t handle it, but that most of the games were pretty terrible.
Peacock will also stream all NBC Sunday Night Football games this season. That includes the playoffs as well as the Football Night in America studio show. So there will be plenty of NFL content on Peacock this year.
If this little experiment with the NFL and NBCUniversal goes well, we could see more games going to streamers exclusively. Now since FOX doesn’t really have a streaming service, the only other options would be CBS’ Paramount+ and ESPN+. Since ESPN does do the Monday Night games. And half of the games for the entire season are on CBS. It’s unclear how many of these games the NFL would want on streaming, since having them on “free” TV channels available OTA means a lot more people watching them.