NFL on American television

The television rights to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games in the United States are the most lucrative and expensive rights of any sport in the world. Television brought professional football into prominence in the modern era after World War II. Since then, National Football League broadcasts have become among the most-watched programs on American television, and the financial fortunes of entire networks have rested on owning NFL broadcasting rights.^{[citation needed]} This has raised questions about the impartiality of the networks' coverage of games and whether they can criticize the NFL without fear of losing the rights and their income.

Since the 1960s, all regular season and playoff games broadcast in the United States have been aired by national television networks. Since 1998, regionally shown regular season games on Sunday afternoons have been televised on CBS and Fox, which primarily carry games of AFC and NFC teams respectively (the conference of the away team generally determines the broadcaster of an inter-conference game). Nationally televised regular season games on Sunday and Monday nights have aired on NBC and ESPN, respectively, since 2006. ABC has also aired selected ESPN-produced regular season games since 2020. In addition, a "flexible scheduling" policy allows the league to reschedule Sunday afternoon and night games to different time slots and/or reassign them to different networks regardless of conference in the second half of the season. Since the 2023 season, Monday night games are now also subject to flexible scheduling. During the postseason, ESPN/ABC airs two or three games, NBC airs two–four games, while CBS and Fox air the rest of the AFC and NFC games, respectively. The Super Bowl is currently rotated annually among CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC/ESPN.

With games airing on CBS, NBC, Fox, and ESPN/ABC, the NFL thus holds broadcast contracts with four companies (Paramount Global, NBCUniversal, Fox Corporation, and The Walt Disney Company [majority ownership, with Hearst Communications owning the remaining ownership of ESPN Inc.]) that control a combined vast majority of the country's television product. These four broadcasters paid a combined total of US$110 billion to air games from 2023 to 2033.^[1] They previously paid a combined total of $39.6 billion to air games between 2014 and 2022.^[2][3][4]

NFL preseason telecasts are more in line with the other major sports leagues' regular-season telecasts: preseason telecasts are more locally produced, usually by a local affiliate of one of the above terrestrial television networks. Some preseason games will air nationally, however. Under the NFL's anti-siphoning rules for cable games, these stations usually will air simulcasts of ESPN and/or NFL Network games in their local markets if the local team is playing.