By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) – The National Football League on Wednesday defended its TV broadcast strategy as the Federal Communications Commission has been reviewing the growing shift of live sports to pay TV and subscription services away from broadcast networks.
The NFL met with FCC staff on Friday, according to documents dated Tuesday and made public on Wednesday. The NFL said more than 87% of its games are aired on free broadcast TV and 100% of local market games are broadcast on local over-the-air TV. The league said the percentage of games aired on broadcast TV has varied little for two decades.
“This distribution model is good for our fans, for local television broadcasters, for our 32 clubs in small and large markets alike, and for the competitiveness of the game itself,” the NFL told the FCC.
The NFL noted 86 of the top 100 TV programs in 2025 were NFL games and said games are strategically picked weekly to put the most compelling game into each broadcast market. The league noted Sunday Night Football on Comcast’s NBC has been the No. 1 program in primetime for 15 years.
Major broadcast station owners including Fox Corp and Sinclair said last month the FCC should address the trend of Big Tech companies acquiring the rights to broadcast football, baseball and other sporting events, saying it could weaken local TV news.
A group of more than 700 affiliate stations for Paramount’s CBS, NBC, FOX and Disney-owned ABC last week urged the FCC to take action “to keep marquee sports programming available on free over-the-air broadcast television for American viewers” saying “sporting events can’t unify Americans if the cost of watching them turns us into a nation of haves and have-nots.”
The National Association of Broadcasters said global streaming giants like Amazon Prime, Alphabet, Apple, and Netflix can use live sports programming as a loss leader.
A 1961 law exempts major sports leagues from antitrust laws and allows them to pool their individual teams’ television rights and sell those rights as a package.
The FCC said many sporting events previously available through free broadcast or traditional cable TV packages are now available only through standalone subscription streaming, which has frustrated many sports fans.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Toby Davis)
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