The NFL’s War on Christmas

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For the NFL, itself, these deals are less about scaling their audience in the United States and more about finding new monetization pipelines. Photo: Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images
Julia Alexander
April 4, 2025

In an age of algorithms and far too many streaming options, one of the many questions keeping streaming executives up at night is how to get people to subconsciously and automatically return to their platform week after week. Netflix attempts to do this by releasing new shows on Fridays, but it’s simply not a satisfying substitute for appointment television. (Who can forget NBC’s must-see TV Thursday night juggernaut of Seinfeld, Friends, and ER in the 1990s? What a time…) That said, no one is better at training audiences than the NFL, whose games are one of the few entertainment experiences that qualify as appointment viewing these days. Whether you watch or not, you know that fall and winter Sundays are for football.