NFL Network executives have started to view the post-“Thursday Night Football” time slot as a place where they can launch new shows.
Even though the slot typically comes after midnight on the East Coast (following the “TNF” postgame show), it’s a slot that has scored the network’s biggest non-live-game audience for the week.
Just seven weeks into the new strategy, network executives are calling it a success. The documentary series “Undrafted” averaged nearly 1.2 million viewers in the two weeks that NFL Network has carried the Thursday night
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SBJ Podcast Archive:
From Nov. 3: Media writer John Ourand and Executive Editor Abraham Madkour discuss the NFL's Thursday night package with CBS and the NFL Network as well as the league's overall ratings strength.
game exclusively (Oct. 30 and Nov. 6). That compares to the viewership of the four episodes of “Finding Giants,” which averaged 589,000 viewers during weeks when the Thursday night game was on CBS and simulcast on NFL Network. It’s also up from the 720,000 viewers the network drew for an episode of “Undrafted” on Oct. 23, the week before NFL Network took over the Thursday games exclusively.
“It’s the same philosophy where networks put an important show after the Super Bowl because it gets the largest sampling audience, which is the most difficult thing to do in today’s world where viewers have so many options,” said Ron Semiao, vice president of programming and media events for NFL Network. “For seven weeks in a row, ‘Finding Giants’ and now ‘Undrafted’ has been the most viewed show on the network outside of the ‘Thursday Night Football’ game.”
In previous years, NFL Network would go from a postgame show to a studio show (“Total Access”) shot from its L.A. studios. By way of comparison to the 1.2 million viewers the network drew on average in weeks 9 and 10 for those two half-hour “Undrafted” episodes this year, in weeks 9 and 10 last year, the hourlong “Total Access” averaged 966,500 viewers.
NFL Network executives believe the new strategy gets viewers to sample programming that could anchor other nights of the week that don’t have a live game.
“We have a large audience there that we already served with highlights and analysis in the postgame show,” Semaio said. “We’re hoping that this type of content, which is a little different than you would normally find on the NFL Network, starts to resonate with fans and that we get these going and build a franchise or two for those nights.”
Semaio, a former ESPN executive who was hired last summer to oversee NFL Network’s programming, wants to keep filling the slot with unscripted shows rather than studio programming to leverage the audience.
“We’re looking for shows that have a broader appeal than just football fans,” he said. “NFL games draw large and broad audiences. They are not all guys. It’s a very broad demographic reach from young to old and a lot of women watching.”
