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Do your NFL viewing habits match the average American’s?

The 2024 Super Bowl was the most watched NFL championship in history. With 123.4 million tuning in for the event, it’s clear the NFL is more popular than ever.

With the 2024-2025 NFL regular season beginning soon, the team at FrontierBundles wanted to find out what the average American’s viewing trends are when it comes to the NFL. How much are Americans willing to spend to watch their favorite team? And what channel or streaming service are they using?

We polled 500 Americans to find out.

$50 overlayed on top of the image of a football player

70% wouldn’t pay $50 a year to watch their favorite team

When asked how much they’d be willing to pay to watch their favorite NFL team, the majority of surveyed Americans said they wouldn’t pay over $50 per year. Since the average American is subscribed to 2.9 streaming services in 2024, perhaps paying over $50 to watch one sport feels like too much to many Americans.

78% Haven't signed up for NFL+

In 2022, the NFL released NFL+, their own streaming service specifically for NFL fans. Despite having an estimated 2 million subscribers as of 2023, though, we found that over 78% of surveyed Americans have not signed up for NFL+.

Watching football with friends.

 37% use Amazon Prime to stream NFL

Rather than use NFL+, the majority of our survey respondents use Amazon Prime to watch their favorite teams play. With Prime’s Thursday Night Football available at no additional costs for members, it’s clear many prefer this as a budget-friendly alternative to other streaming options.

Pro American football line of scrimmage

61% use streaming to watch NFL

With more Americans subscribed to streaming services than traditional cable, it’s no surprise that the same is true for NFL viewers. While 39.23% of respondents still watch the NFL with their cable service, it’s clear that streaming is the new way to watch your favorite sports.

Additional findings

  • While Amazon Prime Video is our respondents’ most-used streaming service for the NFL, ESPN+ comes in second with 34%. NFL+ had the least amount of subscribers from our respondents, with only 19% subscribing to the platform.

  • The majority of respondents have not signed up for an NFL pass to watch their favorite team’s games. 

  • 22% of respondents would pay $50-$100 to watch their favorite team, while only 6% would pay $100-$200, and less than 2% would pay more than $200.

Methodology

For this report, we ran a survey of 500 Americans aged 16+ in August 2024, using the online survey platform Pollfish. The results shown in this article are post-stratified. A post-stratification weighting method is a way to achieve a distribution equal with that of such known characteristics of the population. In this case, it was applied to age and gender.