NFL to air 3 games on Christmas Day 2025, Netflix partnership continues: Source

The NFL will air three games on Christmas Day in 2025, the first two streaming on Netflix and the third as part of Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” package (the holiday falls on a Thursday), an industry source confirmed Tuesday. The news was first reported by John Ourand of Puck.

Netflix landed a three-season deal for exclusive NFL Christmas Day rights last May. The streamer debuted its live NFL programming on Christmas Day 2024 with two games: the Kansas City Chiefs versus the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens versus the Houston Texans. After a few early hiccups, the broadcast was largely successful. Most notably, Netflix seemed to solve most of the major buffering and freezing issues that plagued it a month prior during a boxing event headlined by Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul.

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Last year’s Christmas Day Ravens-Texans game averaged 24.3 million viewers, while the Chiefs-Steelers game drew 24.1 million viewers across Netflix and local CBS stations in the participating markets, per Nielsen. A Beyonce halftime show during the Ravens-Texans game averaged 27 million viewers. The game numbers were down five million viewers from Christmas Day 2023 on CBS but did rank as the most-watched NFL games ever on a streaming service.

What’s next for NFL and Netflix partnership?

The Athletic has written often about Netflix’s sports ambitions over the past 12 months — and with good reason. The company is a behemoth with more than 300 million subscribers globally, including 81 million in the U.S., and a market capitalization north of $395 billion. The NFL has been successful because it is always looking at futures. That was the case when it aligned with Fox in the 1990s and, more recently, Amazon. This streaming triple-header on Christmas Day is something you should pay attention to as a sports fan because Netflix being any kind of player for upcoming live sports rights will change the landscape of sports consumption and cause consternation for the traditional linear powers given its financial might. Last year, the NFL’s viewership for Netflix’s Christmas Day games was below what linear TV delivered on Christmas in 2023 but still averaged 26.5 million U.S. viewers, which broke the record for the most-streamed live sporting event ever in the United States. It’s looking more and more likely that the NFL and Netflix are going to be intertwined come the next decade. — Richard Deitsch, media reporter

(Photo: Aaron M. Sprecher / Getty Images)

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