Could Sunday Night Football be stolen by a streamer?

When it comes to the NFL's nascent effort to get the broadcast networks to pay more money for the remaining years of their current deals, CBS and Fox have been the focus. NBC inevitably will be on the radar screen.

The league has started the process with CBS, activating a change-in-control term that allows the NFL to reopen the deal after the recent Skydance acquisition of Paramount. And it's widely believed CBS will inevitably cough up significantly more than the $2.1 billion per year it's due to pay over the remaining four years of its current contract.

Fox entered the chat when suspicions emerged that Rupert Murdoch is instigating the ongoing political pressure against the league. Those suspicions became confirmed when Murdoch's Wall Street Journal posted an editorial questioning the viability of the league's 65-year-old broadcast antitrust exemption.

As to NBC, the question eventually becomes this: Is the Sunday Night Football package in danger of moving to another provider?

Via John Ourand of Puck, Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson believes that, of the networks currently in business with the NFL, NBC has the greatest risk of losing its prime-time package.

"Look at what NBC is paying for the NBA," Nathanson said. "Now imagine what the NFL wants for Sunday Night Football, which is the best game. What’s stopping Netflix, which wants more events, to get Sunday night’s best game for 18 straight weeks? That would accelerate its ability to monetize ads. So, to me, the NBC Sunday night game is probably the most at risk."

Netflix, of course, would first have to want a weekly package. To date, its focus has been big events.

Amazon could be a better option, since it already has a weekly package. Amazon could pay the freight for Sunday, with NBC sliding to Thursday.

As the league tries to make, if not exacerbate, the pivot to streaming, there's a benefit to having the Sunday night game on an online platform. Folks who may be resisting Prime Video for Thursday games could be more inclined to make the move if that's the only way to cap the traditional NFL viewing day.

It was surely no accident that Amazon got the Packers-Bears wild-card game in January. The contest set a streaming record with 31.6 million viewers.

The counterpoint comes from the bipartisan push against requiring consumers to pay for high-profile NFL games. Shifting the Sunday night game from free TV to streaming won't do much to quiet the current scrutiny from the public, Congress, the FCC, and/or the DOJ.

And, yes, our content is exclusively licensed to NBC. But that won't keep us from covering potentially significant developments that may impact NBC. And it would be significant, to say the least, if the Sunday night game slides off the TV dial entirely and lands on Prime Video.

However it goes, the current deals last four more years. (ESPN's deal runs for five more seasons.) Some networks, like CBS, may extend. Others may dig in. At some point in the next three years, there will be clarity as to the weekly destination of the NFL games that millions will consume, wherever they may land.