The NFL’s Red Zone channels on DirecTV and on cable are a boon to the fan who loves to watch football without commercials. And while you won’t watch an entire game, the way the channels hopscotch from game-to-game plus show scoring opportunities allows fans to see an entire day’s worth of action.
Now CBS and Fox have been silent about the fact that DirecTV and NFL Network can cut into their games and not run any of their ads or promos. We haven’t seen how much this can affect advertising until now. Advertising Age’s Anthony Crupi delved into the issue and found that a heavy viewer of NFL RedZone watching all 17 weeks from 1 p.m. ET through the end of the day’s action sometime around 7:30 p.m. will miss almost 39 hours of advertising (38 hours and 45 minutes to be exact).
Crupi breaks it down even further:
“Another way to look at the impact RedZone may have on a single high-volume viewer is to break down those missed impressions into discrete ad units. Over the course of the regular season, our hypothetical six-point-five-hour viewer is not exposed to 139,200 seconds of advertising, which translates to 4,640 “lost” 30-second spots.”
That’s a lot of lost time, but for fans who are annoyed by the constant breaks, RedZone is a great way to avoid them and keep the TV on for over 6½ hours.
On the other hand, the impact of RedZone might not be that big on the networks. In simple terms, the fear that RedZone cannibalizes CBS or Fox appears to not be as great as thought. While the NFL won’t release actual subscriber numbers for RedZone, it appears that the households that have the channel do not make a dent into the Sunday afternoon ratings:
NFL Network reaches some 73.6 million households, but the vast majority of those subs do not pay the premium required to access the RedZone channel. And while NFLN doesn’t break out the number of RedZone subs, analysts estimate that the base is no larger than 4 million homes.
If that is the case, then CBS and Fox which haven’t said anything publicly about NFL RedZone aren’t worried about the impact that RedZone has on its ratings. In fact, Crupi notes that the Sunday afternoon NFL partners haven’t taken a hit:
And the ad-free service certainly hasn’t diluted either network’s revenue stream; depending on the time slot, matchups and demand, each nationally televised NFL game generates between $35 million to $50 million in ad dollars.
So as NFL RedZone goes into a new season, it knows that fans who subscribe to the channel will be able to watch commercial-free action, but CBS and Fox take some solace that while their games are being used to attract viewers, the hit on their ratings are minimal at best.