How and why a marquee Bears-Packers playoff game ended up on Prime Video

It’s the oldest and finest of playoff football traditions: firing up the grill, icing down a few beverages, staking out the best spot on the couch … and then flipping on Amazon Prime Video.

You already know the NFL is all-in on streaming, offering its Thursday regular season games only on Prime Video. If you don’t want to pony up for Prime in a given week, well, there are another dozen-plus games waiting for you. But the league, aiming for a younger, more tech-savvy audience, has upped the ante in the last few years, putting precious playoff games on streaming services. Suddenly, the push to jump in the fast-moving streaming waters got a lot more urgent.

Advertisement

Two years ago, the NFL debuted a streaming-only game with Dolphins-Chiefs on Peacock, gambling that NFL fans would want to sign up for the service to see Patrick Mahomes in action. Last year, the NFL put the always-grimy AFC North rivalry of Ravens-Steelers on Prime, a playoff matchup more notable for its legacy than its then-current incarnation.

(Trivia: We here at Yahoo Sports streamed the first-ever online-only NFL game, a Bills-Jaguars tilt from Europe way back in 2015. It’s safe to say that this year’s Bills-Jags playoff game will probably outdraw that 9 a.m. ET mid-season one.)

This year, the Saturday night Prime game of the wild-card round will be Packers-Bears, the league’s oldest rivalry — and yet has taken place only twice before in the playoffs despite more than 100 years of history. It’s a massive game, which begs the question: How did this season’s marquee wild-card game end up on Prime?

Advertisement

Per the Chicago Sun-Times and Puck, it was a case of scheduling imperatives … and also, the league playing favorites. All five of the league’s broadcast partners — CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Prime — wanted either 49ers-Eagles or Packers-Bears, the two marquee matchups of this weekend. The NFL likes to schedule its most compelling game in the late-Sunday afternoon slot, and opted to place 49ers-Eagles there on Fox.

The league also prefers to place a 4-5 matchup — this year, Steelers-Texans or Rams-Panthers — in the Monday night playoff slot. Since Pittsburgh-Houston was the more interesting option (sorry, Panthers fans, but you know it’s true), the AFC got the nod there.

However, that set up another conundrum — if the NFL placed an AFC team on Saturday night, that would give the winner a potentially significant rest mismatch. So the AFC got the other two slots on Sunday, leaving the league with a choice between Rams-Panthers and Packers-Bears for the Saturday night Prime game. Since many of the league’s other broadcast partners had aired significant games over the final weeks of the regular season, and since the league likes to keep all its broadcast partners happy … Packers-Bears on Prime, baby!

The NFL understands that it will take a short-term viewership hit every time it streams a game, but maybe a very short-term one: Dolphins-Chiefs in 2023 set a record for the most-streamed event in U.S. history with 23 million viewers. (Comparing streaming viewership numbers is often like comparing apples and bulldogs, but the 2024 Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight on Netflix now appears to hold the crown with 38 million.) Steelers-Ravens in 2024 claimed an average audience of more than 22 million, well in excess of pretty much every other sporting event except other NFL (and occasional college) games.

Advertisement

So what does all this streaming emphasis mean for you, the dedicated NFL viewer? Well, more charges for more streaming services, but you already knew that. The inexorable march of streaming continues, and the NFL has clearly shown an interest in decentralizing its product across multiple networks and services.

Now that there’s no objective difference in game play, stream quality or, once the game starts, user experience between a “broadcast” game and a streaming one on most TVs, all that remains is for the NFL to normalize accessing a streaming service as easily as a broadcast one. And the best way to normalize it is by placing some of the league’s most significant assets — i.e. all-or-nothing playoff games — on those streaming services.

Advertisement

By next year, this will all be normal, and we won’t even need to write one of these “why the NFL is going all-in on streaming” columns. Whether that’s good news to you or bad news probably depends on whether you can remember the 1990s … or your Prime password. For now, though, take heart — the later rounds of the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl will remain on easily accessible, free broadcast TV.

For now.