On Saturday, the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers in an NFL playoff game that had everything: a bitter rivalry, an old-school outdoors atmosphere, and a historic comeback (or choke-job, depending on your POV).
It also happened to be a (mostly) streaming-only game. Did you notice? Or care?
I didn’t. Except for about 30 seconds, when I was trying to find out what network was showing the game, and it took me a beat to realize it was on Amazon’s Prime Video. Then I booted up my app and watched the game without any issue. Just like any other NFL game.
In 2026, “Guy doesn’t have a problem watching the Bears/Packers” is a true dog-bites-man story. But that’s why I’m writing about it here: Not very long ago, the idea of streaming a super-high-profile NFL game — and requiring NFL fans to subscribe to a streaming service in order to watch it — would have been a very big deal.
Now it’s a yawner: I was one of 31.6 million people who watched the game, the vast majority of whom streamed it (fans in local markets could use broadcast TV). That’s a streaming record for an NFL game, and it’s more than some other games got last weekend on conventional TV.
And that tells you just how far sports and streaming have come.
Flash back to 2013, for instance, and the idea of whether the “internet” — a catch-all term that included everything needed to get streaming video onto your screen, from web servers to fiber-optic lines to the router in your house — could support a big NFL game watched by many millions of people was an open question. “Why Web TV Skeptic Mark Cuban Thinks Google Can Make the NFL Work on the Web,” was an ungainly headline I tapped out at the time.
Back then, the NFL and other sports giants were routinely streaming big events like the Super Bowl and World Cup — but only as a sort of secondary outlet for weirdos who didn’t have traditional TV. And anyone who did stream sports had to expect to run into problems, like ESPN did when it streamed a World Cup game in 2014.
A year later, the NFL put on a streaming-only game for the first time — but made sure it was a relatively niche one, and made sure that people knew it was an experiment.
Cut to today, and streaming is just a way we watch some football games now. Amazon pays a gazillion dollars a year to show one game a week during the regular season; Netflix has paid up to show a couple games on Christmas Day. A new deal the NFL struck with Disney last year will give the league the opportunity to sell even more games to digital players.
And two years ago, the league passed another new threshold by moving one of its most valuable assets — a playoff game — to Comcast’s Peacock streamer, where it was only available to paid subscribers. That one generated a ton of complaints from people who said they didn’t want to pay another service to watch an NFL game — along with millions of sign-ups for Peacock, which showed they would.
The NFL is not ditching TV for streaming anytime soon. For many people, watching NFL games is the main reason to watch TV, and that gives the league a ton of leverage to extract ever-increasing fees from the likes of NBC and CBS. So they will almost certainly keep the majority of their games on old-time TV for the foreseeable future. But they’re going to sell them to streaming platforms too — because they’ll pay up to get them, and you’ll pay, too.
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