• by Wayne Friedman , 2 hours ago

Against the backdrop of NFL preparing its option to renegotiate current TV deals, a note from Guggenheim Securities says TV network costs for the league remain a great deal in terms of the "cost per viewer hours" of NFL games.

The key component is from TV viewership -- which grew 10% to 18.7 million average viewers in the just completed 2025 season, according to Michael Morris, media analyst of Guggenheim Securities.

This was the second-most-watched regular season on record, he says. By comparison, current NBA regular-season games come in at around 1.8 million Nielsen-measured viewers.

He calculates that the “cost per viewer hour” for the league was $1.20 for last season.

The NBA, by comparison, is at $3.55 -- a “2.8x premium for the NBA, despite the NFL delivering nearly 4X the viewing hours annually.” Morris calls this an "attractive" deal for networks/streamers.

This amounts to nearly 8 billion viewing hours annually for the NFL versus 2 billion for the NBA.

Comparing regular-season ratings shows that the NFL came in at 17.5 million Nielsen-measured viewers for a regular-season game (2024 season), versus the NBA’s 1.6 million (2024-2025 season).

However, “The higher cost of the NBA rights on a per-viewer business is informative but not definitive in the context of increased value potential for NFL rights," Morris cautions.

But when adding the value of subscription fees, advertising revenue and other factors, “then either the NBA partners overpaid significantly relative to performance or the NFL should drive significantly more long-term value to partners than is implied at current rates.”

The NFL’s current media rights deals, which started in 2023 and through 2033, are valued at over $110 billion total, or over $10 billion annually.

The NBA new 11-year contracts (starting 2025-26) come to $76 billion to $77 billion total -- roughly $7 billion per year.

New NFL negotiations are expected to commence later this spring.