Due to the NFL understanding television at an earlier time, they were able to surpass Major League Baseball in the 1960s as the most popular sport in the United States.
[1] Regular broadcasts of games began after World War II and the first NFL championship to be televised was the 1948 match between the Eagles and Chicago Cardinals.
DuMont focused on teams that played in markets that had one of the network's O&O's and offered regional coverage of the New York Giants (WABD, now WNYW), Pittsburgh Steelers (WDTV, now KDKA-TV), and Washington Redskins (WTTG).
This led to the 1955 NFL season having erratic broadcasting contracts, with the Giants, Eagles, & Steelers remaining on DuMont, the Bears, Cardinals, Rams, & 49ers remaining on ABC, the Cleveland Browns (one of the league's most successful and popular teams) and Redskins (the only team at the time representing the South) having their own regionalized coverage, and the Baltimore Colts (who despite also geographically being in the South represented the more Northeastern-like Baltimore) and Detroit Lions (despite the presence of then-ABC O&O WXYZ-TV) restricted to their home markets.
The Green Bay Packers had no local television coverage, due to playing in both the smallest market in the major professional sports leagues.
The 1958 NFL Championship Game played at Yankee Stadium between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants went into sudden death overtime.
A special antitrust exemption, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, was passed in Congress to accommodate the collective contract, which restricted what days the league could televise their games.
With NBC paying the AFL $36 million in 1965 to televise its games, and the intensified battle over college prospects, both leagues negotiated a merger agreement on June 8, 1966.
MNF pushed the limits of football coverage with its halftime highlights segment, occasional banter from Howard Cosell and Don Meredith, and celebrity guests such as John Lennon, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton.
During its 36-year run on ABC, Monday Night Football consistently ranked among the most popular prime time broadcasts each week during the season.
NBC has also tried one-announcer football when Dick Enberg called the New York Jets' visit to Cleveland Browns on December 12, 1981 without his regular colleague Merlin Olsen in accompaniment.
Meanwhile, the Super Bowl became a yearly ratings blockbuster, allowing the broadcasting network to generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
In 1986, the United States Football League, at the time pursuing an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, signed an agreement with ESPN to carry games on Sunday nights.
When the lawsuit failed and the 1986 season was canceled, the NFL swooped in and took the time slot, creating ESPN Sunday Night Football in 1987.
The combined 1990 contracts with ABC, CBS, ESPN, NBC, and TNT totaled $3.6 billion ($900 million per year), the largest in TV history.
One major factor in the increased rights fee was that the league changed the regular season so that all teams would play their 16-game schedule over a 17-week period.
In October, two "all-star" exhibition games were held with generic NFC and AFC teams in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and aired on TBS.
Fox was only seven years old and had no sports division, but it began building its own coverage by hiring many former CBS personalities such as Summerall and Madden.
Fox's NFL rights ownership made the network a major player in American television by attracting many new viewers (and affiliates) and a platform to advertise its other shows.
In the meantime, CBS lost several affiliates (mainly owned by New World Communications in NFC markets) to Fox, and ratings for its other offerings languished.
CBS, stung by Fox's surprise bid four years earlier, aggressively sought to reacquire some broadcasting rights.
NBC, meanwhile, had indicated a desire to bid for Monday Night Football rights in 1998, but gave up when the financial stakes increased sharply.
ESPN agreed to a $4.8 billion ($600 million a season) deal to become the sole cable broadcaster of NFL games, marking an end to the league's association with TNT.
In 2012, the kickoff game between the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys aired on Wednesday, September 5, to avoid conflict with the final night of the Democratic National Convention in which incumbent president Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech for the party nomination.
Despite relatively high, if declining, TV ratings, ABC decided to end its relationship with the NFL after losing significant money on Monday Night Football.
ET with Al Michaels serving as the play-by-play announcer, Cris Collinsworth as color commentator, and Michele Tafoya as the sole sideline reporter.
[17] On February 5, 2014, the league announced it had sold off eight weeks of the NFL Network's Thursday Night Football package to CBS, who outbid competitors ABC, Fox, NBC, and Turner Sports.
Beginning in 2018, at the league's behest, it broadened the availability to all devices of that size and offered them through a newly acquired subsidiary, Yahoo!
In March 2021, Amazon acquired exclusive rights to TNF as part of the next round of NFL broadcasting agreements starting in 2022.
Among the new changes:[28][29] In a separate deal, YouTube TV takes over the rights for NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV for $2 Billion a year.