Rebecca Lowe, Ted Lasso and innovation helped NBC's Premier League gamble pay off
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Set us as preferred When NBC paid a quarter-billion dollars for the U.S.broadcast rights to the English Premier League beginning in 2013 it was an expensive gamble.
Just 4% of Americans ranked soccer as their favorite sport, according to a Gallup poll taken that year.And the network was drawing a 0.1 rating for its coverage of Major League Soccer games that season.More people were watching paint dry.But the wager has paid off big.
When the network kicked off its 14th season of EPL coverage last month, the opening Saturday game between Brentford and Tottenham drew an average audience of 1.2 million on NBC and its Peacock streaming service, up 16% from the opening Saturday game last August.“When we took on the project, we all just thought it was awesome and it was just a fun, ‘Hey, let’s just do the best we can,’” said Pierre Moossa, the coordinating producer for NBC Sports’ broadcast coverage of the Premier League from the start.“I don’t think we all appreciated how much it would change.”Much of the change has favored NBC, which will air all 380 EPL games this season on NBC, the USA Network and its Peacock streaming service.According to a recent Parks Associates and InterDigital survey, roughly 70% of U.S.
sports viewers at least partly watch on streaming services like Peacock, which will carry more than half of all EPL games.And the audience for those games skews young, with more than half of all avid soccer viewers aged 18-to-34, a demographic highly sought by advertisers and one that suggests NBC’s numbers could stay strong for years.Then there’s the growing popularity of the sport itself.
Over the past 14 years the number of Americans ranking soccer as their favorite has more than doubled, to 10%, trailing only tackle football and basketball, according to a survey by The Economist.The success of th...