Netflix Puts Live NFL on Christmas Day and the Numbers Come In

Netflix streamed the NFL’s Christmas Day doubleheader on 25 December 2024, under a three-year deal announced in May 2024 that also covers at least one Christmas game in 2025 and 2026. The 2024 broadcast was the platform’s first live NFL carriage. Chiefs at Steelers kicked off the afternoon slot; Ravens at Texans followed in the evening. The Chiefs won 29-10. The Ravens won 31-2. Beyoncé performed the halftime set of the Ravens-Texans game in her hometown of Houston, debuting material from the Cowboy Carter album with Post Malone, Shaboozey, and a guest list the broadcast had not pre-announced.

Netflix’s subsequent disclosure placed the US gameday audience at 65 million, with average-minute audiences of roughly 24 million across each game per Nielsen. The Beyoncé halftime set peaked at approximately 27 million US viewers, which Nielsen tagged as the most-watched NFL halftime segment on record since 2001. Netflix paid a reported $150 million across the two 2024 games under the three-year deal’s initial window.

What the deal does

The NFL’s Christmas Day slot has been contested across the last three seasons. The league played three Christmas games in 2023 (two on CBS, one on Amazon Prime Video) and moved both 2024 Christmas games to Netflix. The 2025 and 2026 Christmas slots carry at least one game each to Netflix under the current deal.

The structural fact the deal establishes is Netflix’s first scheduled live NFL presence, and the timing points to the platform’s broader sports-rights positioning. Across 2024 and early 2025, Netflix carried the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight in November and launched its multi-year WWE Raw deal in January 2025, reversing its long-stated aversion to live-event carriage.

Netflix’s ad-tier is still scaling and the platform has not disclosed the ad inventory sold against the games. The reported $150 million is not likely to have been recovered through 2024 ad revenue alone. What Netflix appears to be buying is the subscriber-acquisition and retention effect of a large-scale live event inside the subscription product, alongside the audience-demonstration effect for the ad-tier upfront pitch.

The audience numbers

The 65 million gameday figure is Netflix’s first-party number, reported against Nielsen measurement. It sits slightly below a typical 2024 Sunday Night Football peak on NBC and well below the Super Bowl (above 123 million US viewers for Super Bowl LVIII in February 2024 on CBS). The comparison-appropriate benchmark is the Christmas 2023 doubleheader on CBS and Amazon, which averaged in a similar band.

The numbers confirm Netflix can deliver a large live-sports audience on the first try. They do not confirm that the platform can deliver that audience consistently, against regular-season Sunday inventory, or across the full range of live-sports demands.

The technical issues

The broadcast ran into specific and widely-reported buffering problems, particularly during the first game’s early window. Downdetector logged around 500 Netflix-related complaints during the gameday’s peak period, and reporting cited picture-quality fluctuation, Chromecast casting failures, and localised buffering under peak load.

Netflix has not publicly quantified the scope of the issues. The third-party reporting has been mixed: some outlets described the problems as widespread, others as localised and quickly resolved. The Paul-Tyson fight in November 2024, with a reported 60 million peak concurrent streams, produced buffering complaints at a similar scale. The Christmas broadcast was the platform’s second major live-event stress test in six weeks, and the technical issues repeated.

What to watch

Three things. First, whether Netflix’s 2025 Christmas technical performance improves on the 2024 baseline. Second, whether Netflix expands its NFL carriage beyond the Christmas window during the current deal period; existing rights-holders (Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video) have agreements running through 2033, so Netflix’s entry is currently additive rather than substitutive. Third, whether the Christmas broadcast’s subscriber and ad-tier impact shows up in Netflix’s Q1 2025 disclosure.

Netflix has established a baseline for live-sports carriage at scale. The baseline is imperfect on the technical side and ambiguous on the economics. The NFL has established that its Christmas slot can deliver streaming-exclusive audiences to a rights buyer willing to pay at the $75-million-per-game tier. The next two Christmas cycles will clarify whether the test replicates.