Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, live from Brooklyn, where my household is mourning the Knicks’ playoff run. In better news, at least Nuggets star Nikola Jokic can finally go home to see his horses.

Also, I was thrilled to interview the legendary Alan Cumming last week about his hit Peacock reality-competition show The Traitors. You can find a transcript of our Q&A here.

Tonight, we’re pivoting from basketball to football. The industry remains obsessed with Netflix’s deal to broadcast at least one NFL game per year—so obsessed, in fact, that many analysts and journalists are backsliding into sloppy and misleading analogizing. Allow me to explain why it’s about more than just scale.

But first…

• Disney and Netflix’s next big battle: Earlier this month, Netflix launched a massive interactive “theme park” with Roblox, a virtual world populated by 300 million monthly, mostly teenage users. Meanwhile, Disney is gearing up to launch its own virtual theme park with Epic Games’ Fortnite and its 500 million monthly players. It’s obvious why: Almost four in 10 teen boys play video games daily, according to Pew Research Center, with 23 percent playing multiple times a day. Pew also found that a significant portion of teens play video games for socialization; 89 percent of teens said they played with friends, and 47 percent noted that they’d made friends through games. Simply put, the sort of critical formative socialization and entertainment that used to take place outside the home is now happening across a series of different gaming ecosystems.

  Disney, which has a history of gaming misfires, hopes that Fortnite can help control attention that isn’t spent watching video. Since Fortnite is increasingly social, and offers a universe outside of pure gaming, Disney can use the I.P. to study all sorts of behavioral data. The company’s incentive isn’t to lure users back to an owned-and-operated platform, like Disney+, but rather to capture lost attention that isn’t otherwise coming back.

  Netflix, which once publicly said its biggest competitor was sleep, has become large enough in streaming that it must pursue another sector of leisure time. Back in 2022, players inside Minecraft built their own Squid Game levels. Now, the Roblox partnership will determine whether there is a way to keep younger kids engaged with Netflix even when they’re not streaming. Importantly, Netflix won’t have to pay for the technology in this kind of endeavor, de-risking the investment. As everyone watches future earnings reports for streaming numbers, Greg Peters and Bob Iger are already contemplating the next frontier.

Things are different, however, outside the U.S. Soccer (sorry, European readers), cricket, hockey, tennis, and volleyball have larger global fan bases (viewership and social media engagement) when looking at per-capita statistics. The NBA actually has a stronger presence in international territories. To put things into perspective, licensed NFL merchandise brings in roughly $3 billion a year, according to Sports Business Journal—an eye-popping figure until you consider that the top 20 European soccer clubs’ commercial (non-match day, non-media) revenues hit roughly $5.6 billion in 2023, according to Deloitte. The NFL’s decision to play games in England, Germany, and Brazil this year may help create activity in those markets, but as of now, there’s no substantial business outside the U.S.

Live pro football solves a number of problems for a streamer looking to provide stronger opportunities for advertisers. The company has been experimenting for some time with sports-adjacent content (Full Swing, the Tom Brady roast) and ad-friendly events (WWE, that creepy forthcoming Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match, even the “Netflix Slam” tennis match featuring Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz). An NFL game package that costs $120 million is still cheaper than $400 million for two Knives Out sequels or those two Zack Snyder movies, Rebel Moon and Rebel Moon: Part 2—The Scargiver, which reportedly cost $160 million total and have thus far failed to crack the streamer’s top 10 films of all time.

Sports, even if they’re disposable, are also more reliable: The WWE is consistent, 52-week programming with a built-in and growing audience, compared to the constant binge-and-repeat behavior Netflix typically gets. Also, the NFL games will include ads, no matter what tier they’re aired on, giving advertisers access to all of Netflix’s 270 million customers. And Netflix can segment by country, a crucial factor considering that in the U.S., where the largest NFL interest remains, Netflix’s ad tier generated 40 percent of all new signups in Q1, putting the streamer in sixth place, according to Antenna.

Netflix’s biggest series, such as Squid Game, Bridgerton, Stranger Things, and Wednesday, each tackle a different audience cluster, and each cluster represents a different percentage share of Netflix’s overall base. Bridgerton, Shonda Rhimes’ period romance, had a total of 207.1 million views across 16 hours of runtime, with an audience that was 81 percent female and largely under the age of 30, according to Parrot Analytics, where I work as V.P. of strategy. Quarterback, the Peyton Manning-produced documentary series, had 3.2 million views across eight hours of runtime, with an audience that was 83 percent male, and also mostly under 30.

As much as the NFL is looking to go international, Netflix could use pro football to help it check a box. Both in the U.S. and globally, Netflix is one of the more female-leaning platforms, particularly compared with local cable networks in countries where the NFL is trying to establish a base. In Latin America, for example, sports audiences are close to a 50-50 male-female split, according to Global Web Index’s annual report on sports engagement. Sports viewership in Asia and the Middle East skews much younger than other territories.

The reach of Netflix’s young and female audience is therefore appealing to a league trying to grow its international footprint. And while the NFL may be one of the smaller sports internationally, its older, male audience is something Netflix needs if it is going to strengthen its pitch to advertisers. Keep this in mind every time you read analyses comparing Netflix’s deal with the NFL to ESPN’s or Amazon’s. What the NFL needs from Netflix is different than anything it’s ever needed from any of its current partners.