Beyoncé provided more excitement than either game during Netflix’s NFL debut on Christmas Day.
Netflix agreed to a three-year contract in May to broadcast Christmas Day games.
The NFL played its first games on Christmas Day in 1971 with a pair of divisional playoff games.
This wasn’t the first time NFL games aired exclusively on a streaming service.
The largest audience for a streamed-exclusive NFL game was 23 million on Peacock for last season’s AFC wild-card game between the Miami Dolphins and the Chiefs.
When Netflix made its NFL debut on Christmas Day, Beyoncé generated more excitement than either game.
The 32-time Grammy winner stunned her hometown Houston audience with a nearly 13-minute performance on Wednesday, riding into her halftime appearance on a white horse.
In an unexpected move, she brought out Shaboozey to perform “Sweet Honey Buckiin’,” and Post Malone joined her for “Levii’s Jeans.”. “.”.
The NFL featured four of the top five AFC teams, but the on-field action fell short of expectations.
In the first game, Kansas City dominated Pittsburgh 29–10, and Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce found a weakness in their defense.
According to NFL Media, the actual broadcast went off without a hitch and swiftly rose to the second-most popular live title on Netflix to date.
The Ravens and Lamar Jackson were in the lead. J. . At halftime, Stroud and the Texans were ahead 17–2, but Beyoncé took center stage. With Jackson taking the majority of the fourth quarter off, Baltimore won 31-2.
The two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs defeated the Steelers to secure the No. 1 seed after Mariah Carey opened the football doubleheader with a recorded rendition of “All I Want for Christmas is You.”. One AFC seed.
Netflix made a few small mistakes at the beginning of the pregame show, but there were no indications of any significant streaming problems during the game. There were about ten seconds of silence at the beginning of the show because it seemed that studio host Kay Adams had forgotten to turn on her microphone.
It appeared that Beyoncé’s live performance at NRG Stadium, which was intended to be the streaming behemoth’s biggest test, went off without a hitch.
With Mahomes throwing for 320 yards and three touchdowns and Kelce catching eight passes for 84 yards and one touchdown, the Chiefs (15-1) secured home-field advantage and a first-round bye in the AFC playoffs. After three straight losses, the Steelers (10-6) might have to make do with a wild-card berth.
Derrick Henry had 147 yards rushing and one touchdown, and Jackson threw two touchdown passes and ran for a score to help the Ravens (11-5) surpass Pittsburgh by one game and take the lead in the AFC North.
In May, Netflix agreed to a three-year deal to broadcast games on Christmas Day. The NFL is anticipated to host one of the most popular days for the streaming service since its 1998 launch.
For the first time, a single outlet distributed an NFL game worldwide, making it available to Netflix’s 282.3 million subscribers across more than 190 countries. The games were accessible on Netflix in five different languages: German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
When Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fought in November, Netflix had trouble streaming the bout. 14. . There were 38 million concurrent streams in the US during the bout’s peak of 65 million concurrent streams. Almost 85,000 viewers reported issues with streaming or outages before and during the fight, according to the website Down Detector.
The first game was watched by viewers from almost 200 countries, and within minutes of the pregame show going live, viewers in all 50 states tuned in, according to NFL Media. Netflix announced prior to the Ravens-Texans game that it had surpassed its highest concurrent viewership of any Christmas in the previous four years.
The NFL’s first games were on Wednesdays because the Steelers and Ravens had to play in December. due to the COVID-19 pandemic on February 2, 2020. The Giants and Cowboys’ season-opening game in 2012 was the only other Wednesday game played in the league since 1948.
Two divisional playoff games marked the NFL’s inaugural games on Christmas Day in 1971. On December, the league did not play. 25 from 1972 to 1988, and if Christmas fell on a Sunday, its entire schedule was moved to Saturday. There have been thirty games on Christmas since 1989, with no more than three ever taking place on that day. But the NFL made a special effort to fit two games into Wednesday’s schedule in order to fulfill its $150 million agreement with Netflix.
NFL games were broadcast exclusively on streaming services before. Peacock streamed the Packers-Eagles game in São Paulo, Brazil, in Week 1 of the league’s third season of Thursday night games on Amazon Prime Video, and Prime Video will stream a wild-card game. Last year, YouTube TV became the new home for the “Sunday Ticket” package.
The Miami Dolphins vs. Chiefs AFC wild-card game last season drew the largest audience of any NFL game streamed exclusively on Peacock, with 23 million viewers.
