The 2025 NFL season kicks off on Thursday evening, with the defending Tremendous Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles internet hosting the Dallas Cowboys. Forward of that sport, and one other season, the league is doing one thing it sometimes frowns upon.
Not the women and men carrying black-and-white stripes, thoughts you, however the women and men on the Nielsen scores system. In a brand new interview, Paul Bellew, the league’s Chief Knowledge and Analytics Officer, indicated that the NFL believes the scores service is undercounting viewers of NFL video games.
“There are thousands and thousands of viewers that we imagine they’re systematically undercounting,” mentioned Bellew, as quoted by the Wall Road Journal.
That assertion comes because the NFL strikes much more video games to stand-alone streaming providers, reminiscent of Amazon Prime and Netflix. As with earlier seasons, Thursday evening video games — besides the Week 1 opener between the Cowboys and the Eagles — are streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Netflix returns for a pair of video games on Christmas Day, and late within the 12 months, some video games shall be streamed on Peacock.
The Week 1 Friday evening sport between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs from Brazil will even be streamed, each on YouTube and YouTubeTV.
Within the interview with the Wall Road Journal, Bellew, who serves on Nielsen’s advisory board, pointed to 2 areas of concern for the NFL. First, the idea of “co-viewing,” the place teams of individuals collect to observe video games collectively. Within the league’s thoughts, that is working to undercount the NFL’s viewership. As well as, the NFL believes that Nielsen’s scores should not accurately capturing viewers on streaming providers. Particularly, Bellew believes that Nielsen’s knowledge doesn’t embody “first-party viewers knowledge from a lot of the streaming providers,” which is important to the league’s push in direction of streaming.
Within the piece revealed by the Wall Road Journal, a Nielsen consultant declared that the service is “assured this would be the most precisely rated soccer season in historical past.”
Why does this matter to the NFL? With the league’s push in direction of streaming, described by Commissioner Roger Goodell as a method of going the place the eyeballs are, the higher the numbers are, the higher the choice seems.
And the extra favorable the phrases shall be when offers are renegotiated, which may start as early as 2029 beneath present media rights agreements.