The NFL has owned Thanksgiving for decades. With Amazon taking over the Thursday night package (but not getting the Thanksgiving night game, which is televised by NBC), the online behemoth has its sights set on another slice of the four-day weekend.
Via John Ourand of Sports Business Journal, Amazon “has made a little bit of noise” regarding the possibility of a Black Friday game. Ourand reports that the NFL “has been lukewarm to this idea.”
Any attempt to televise a Friday game before the middle of December would raise questions regarding the league’s broadcast antitrust exemption. In exchange for the ability to sell the TV rights for all games in a bulk package and not on a team-by-team basis, the league can’t broadcast games on Fridays or Saturdays from the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December. That said, because the Friday prohibition is aimed at protecting high school football, NFL games can be televised on Fridays, before 6:00 p.m. EST.
A separate issue possibly arises under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which creates the antitrust exemption. Does the term “televising” include “streaming”? If it does, the exemption applies. If it doesn’t, the NFL could have a problem when selling the global rights to a streaming service, like it has done with Thursday nights on Amazon.
For now, no one is fighting that point. As streaming proliferates, it will be interesting to see whether anyone does.
