• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Looking to amp up its already dominant TV content and viewing performance, the NFL will give away some content for free: An early regular-season NFL game. On a streaming platform.

YouTube will get exclusive rights to stream the Friday night week in one regular game of the 2025 NFL season in São Paulo, Brazil on September 5.

This game will go out to a global audience on YouTube and YouTube TV for free.

For the NFL, this is yet another effort to offer consumers easy access to their content -- on a free streaming service, which in turn equates into great promotion for the league and YouTube.

But there is always money involved. For the last two years, YouTube/YouTube TV has had the exclusive “NFL Sunday Ticket” out of market game package -- a costly $2.2 billion yearly rights deal.

Advertising-wise, we can be sure “NFL Sunday Ticket” will get ample marketing on-air messaging exposure.

This is intended to pull existing and NFL fans into buying that product, which will now cost $480 a year -- or $378 a year if consumers also buy a YouTube TV subscription.

The NFL wants to boost viewing overall -- and most likely for streaming in particular going forward. This is good news, as fans are regularly now behaviorally at ease in paying for streaming NFL exclusive games.

Last year Amazon’s exclusive “Thursday Night Football" saw increasing viewership with 13.2 million viewers, up from 11.9 million in 2023 and 9.6 million in 2022.

But overall, NFL average regular-season viewership -- across all platforms -- was 17.5 million (down 2% vs. 17.9 million the year before.)

Using Amazon’s “TNF” as a benchmark, streaming is 26% below that of the NFL’s overall regular-season average.

To be sure, two new Netflix exclusive Christmas NFL Games, shows significantly better results -- averaging 26.5 million Nielsen-measured viewers, two of the most streamed NFL games ever.

But consider these were late season games which can always attract a big crowd -- a holiday crowd at that. Thanksgiving day games regularly outperforms other regular-season games, mostly earlier-season games.

This is only the start for the NFL of expansion and driving better results -- including internationally, where the league will air seven games in Brazil, Ireland, Spain, Germany, and England.

Where else can the league do? Perhaps look for another day of the week to schedule games, as well as a 18-game regular-season schedule for teams.

While all this hasn’t happened yet, count on the league finding other ways to make big media scores.