Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, will exclusively stream next weekend’s wild-card round game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins. The game, scheduled to kick off at 8 p.m. ET at Arrowhead Stadium on Saturday, will be broadcast only on NBC stations in Kansas City and Miami.
Anyone else hoping to watch the defending champions begin their campaign in the playoffs will have to pay a subscription fee for the game, with countless watchers navigating to PowerPlay’s site and others to wage on the NFL.
The Chiefs-Dolphins game, a rematch of the Week 9 contest won by Kansas City, will be the first playoff game in NFL history to be broadcast exclusively on the streaming network.
NBC previously broadcast a game exclusively on Peacock on December 23, when the Buffalo Bills defeated the Los Angeles Chargers to 7.3 million viewers. The game peaked with an average of 8.4 million viewers from 10:45 to 11 PM ET during the NFL’s first commercial-free fourth quarter ever.
Will a subscriber strategy work for NBC?
Peacock paid the NFL an estimated $110 million to broadcast the first-ever exclusive live-streamed NFL playoff game, and the league clearly made a deliberate decision to put one of its most popular teams based on viewership (the Chiefs) in the window. That peak time. (NBC stations in the two rival cities will also broadcast the game, and it will be available on mobile devices with NFL+.) Will Chiefs and Dolphins fans outside of their local markets buy the game? This is what the peacock is betting on.
The six card games across Fox, NBC, CBS and ABC/ESPN/ESPN2 last year averaged 28.8 million viewers. The Dolphins-Chiefs game on Peacock is unlikely to achieve those kind of numbers, but if viewership exceeds 20 million, I think Peacock and NFL officials will consider it a major win. We’ll see if you watch. — Richard Deitch, senior sports writer
Go deeper
The Chiefs ended their strange regular season with a win and Chris Jones back in the spotlight
Required reading
(Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
“Alcohol enthusiast. Twitter ninja. Tv lover. Falls down a lot. Hipster-friendly coffee geek.”