NFL television blackout policies

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The National Football League television blackout policies are the strictest among the four major professional sports leagues in North America.

The NFL maintained a blackout policy, from 1973 through 2014, that stated that a home game cannot be televised in the team's local market if 85 percent of the tickets are not sold out 72 hours before the starting time of the match. This made the NFL the only major professional sports league in the US that requires teams to sell out tickets in order to broadcast a game on television locally. Nationally televised games in the other leagues often are blacked out on the national networks on which the game is airing in the local markets of the participating teams. Those games still can be seen on the local broadcast television station or regional sports network that normally holds their local/regional broadcast rights. The NFL's blackout policy has been suspended on a year-to-year basis since 2015.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

The NFL also is the only league that imposes an anti-siphoning rule in all teams' local markets: the NFL sells syndication rights of each team's cable and streaming games to a local over-the-air station in each local market. The respective cable station must be blacked out when that team is playing the said game (alternate telecasts, such as Nickelodeon’s NFL broadcasts, are not required to be simulcast in the local markets), but streaming games are not subject to blackout if the local station is simulcasting.^[6]