The NFL staged its first regular-season game in Australia on 10 September, with the Los Angeles Rams beating the San Francisco 49ers at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of 100,021 spectators. The game was streamed exclusively on Netflix, which distributed it in more than 200 countries in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.
The fixture was the first of five regular-season NFL games Netflix carries this season, alongside the NFL Honors awards show in February 2027. The remaining slate is Packers-Rams on 25 November, a Christmas Day double-header of Packers-Bears and Bills-Broncos, and a Week 18 game on 9 January. Melbourne was one of nine overseas regular-season games the league has scheduled across ten host cities in 2026, a programme that will send 16 of the 32 franchises abroad. The Victorian state government is paying a reported A$10m to A$15m per game under a contract covering two confirmed fixtures over four years with an option for a third, and reported A$300m in visitor spending across the game weekend, with hotel occupancy at 92 per cent the night before kick-off. Roughly half of those in attendance travelled interstate or from overseas, including an estimated 10,000 fans from the United States. Kick-off was set for 10.35am local time to land in the American Sunday evening window.
What the arrangement reveals is a deliberate separation of the two currencies the NFL now sells. Netflix is not being used primarily as an advertising platform: its in-game NFL advertising revenue in 2025-26 was US$112.8m, against US$1.13bn for Fox, US$996m for NBC and Peacock, US$902m for CBS, US$525.1m for ESPN and ABC and US$488.1m for Amazon. It is being used as a global distribution platform, and it is being measured accordingly. Netflix disclosed no United States audience figure for the Melbourne game. The only published viewership came from Australia, where free-to-air broadcaster Seven recorded 2.19m total reach and a 938,000 linear average, its most-watched NFL telecast, with a further 155,000 on the 7plus streaming service. For a league whose domestic packages are priced against Nielsen ratings, moving a season-opening window onto a platform that instead reports global reach is a material change in how inventory is valued.
The timing is not incidental. Roger Goodell said this month that the league is weighing whether to repackage its media rights, which run to 2032 with opt-outs available after the 2029 season, and streaming exclusives are the proof-of-concept for any new package built around international matchups. The constraint sits in the labour agreement rather than the market: the current collective bargaining agreement caps international games at ten until it expires in 2031, while Goodell has said the league is working towards sixteen a year. Host governments, meanwhile, are establishing a price for league expansion at roughly US$7m to US$11m per fixture in public subsidy, a benchmark every market bidding for an NFL game will now be measured against.
