Federal pressure continues to mount against the NFL as the league places more games on paid streaming services.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, FCC chairman Brendan Carr issued his strongest statement yet<\/a> regarding the status of the NFL\u2019s federal antitrust exemption. As it stands, the NFL and other professional sports leagues in the United States are granted antitrust exemptions that allow the leagues to centralize the sale of their broadcast rights, selling league-wide packages to national broadcast partners rather than having individual teams sell their own game inventory.<\/p>\n Out of the four major pro sports leagues in the U.S., the NFL is most dependent on this exemption as 100% of its game inventory is sold in national packages.<\/p>\n But as the league continues to fragment its inventory, awarding exclusive games and packages to streamers like Netflix and Prime Video, the federal government has began to evaluate whether the NFL is holding up its end of the bargain by keeping game broadcasts accessible for consumers.<\/p>\n \u201cDoes the NFL still benefit from the antitrust exemption when they\u2019re negotiating for carriage of games not on a sponsored telecast, but on a streaming service?\u201d Carr asked at an event in Washington, DC, on Thursday, per Rohan Goswami of Semafor. \u201cThat\u2019s a very live, very ripe question.\u201d<\/p>\n The NFL\u2019s exemption is a product of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. Of course, in 1961, free-to-air broadcast networks were the only form of television. Cable channels and streaming services were far off inventions. Federal regulators could conceivably interpret the law as only applying to broadcast networks, thus jeopardizing the NFL\u2019s exemption if it sells games to streaming services.<\/p>\n There is \u201ca point at which you sort of tip the scale, and they\u2019ve just put too many games behind a paywall, and then that whole exemption collapses,\u201d Carr said.<\/p>\n It is true that, at its core, antitrust exemptions are granted on the basis that the entity being given the exemption acts in the best interest of consumers. If federal regulators and lawmakers deem the NFL\u2019s business practices to be sufficiently anti-consumer, they can credibly threaten the league\u2019s exemption.<\/p>\n Carr\u2019s FCC is already seeking public comment<\/a> on the matter. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who heads the Senate\u2019s antitrust committee, is urging the DOJ and FTC to reexamine the exemption<\/a>.<\/p>\n As the NFL enters renewed negotiations with its broadcast partners, the number of games it moves from over-the-air broadcast networks to streaming services will be of close interest to the federal government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal pressure continues to mount against the NFL as the league places more games on paid streaming services.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[17105,349,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-547852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-brendan-carr","9":"tag-nfl","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}