NFL is giving ABC a bonus six-pack of “Monday Night Football” simulcasts

Given a scheduling update announced Friday, ABC’s wide reach will complement ESPN’s deliveries on a half-dozen additional nights, including the Oct. 14 showdown between the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets and a meeting between the Super Bowl LV antagonists Kansas on November 4th City and Tampa Bay. Future improvements will help Disney attract larger audiences in late November – Texans-Cowboys (November 18) and Ravens-Chargers (November 25) – and during Christmas week, as ABC hosts ESPN’s December 23 Saints-Packers telecast will support.

All in all 13 MNF Games will air on ABC through the end of the regular season, a schedule that includes two standalone broadcasts in September. While that’s still fewer than the 19 Monday night games ABC aired in 2023, this surge in network television was made possible by the writers’ strike that sidelined the release of scripted shows last fall.

ABC’s October surprise retroactively confirms Disney advertising sales chief Rita Ferro’s spring forecast for a robust slate MNF Simulcasts. In May, when the NFL was putting the finishing touches on the 2024-25 schedule, Ferro said Sportico She believed ABC would land up to ten games.

Nielsen estimates that ABC’s signals are received by 66% of all U.S. television households, representing 83.02 million households. That’s approximately 15.5 million more households than ESPN’s recent subscriber count, and as we saw last season, this increased reach translates into significant ratings gains.

Last year’s emergency measures contributed to the recovery MNF Deliveries increased 29% year-over-year as ESPN and ABC combined averaged 17.32 million viewers per game, up from 13.41 million the previous season. ABC’s impact was felt immediately after last year’s Bills-Jets opener, when Aaron Rodgers’ short-lived debut with Gang Green averaged 22.62 million viewers. The ABC-ESPN outfit would surpass that number in Week 11, drawing a record 28.96 million fans with the Eagles’ 21-17 victory over the Chiefs, making it the NFL’s seventh most-watched game of the regular season could boast of 2023.

ABC’s exclusive Christmas night broadcast of the Ravens-49ers matchup drew an additional 27.61 million viewers, ranking ninth on the list of the league’s top draws.

In the first seven games MNF averaged 13.07 million viewers, down 10% from last year (14.52 million), when ABC already had a supporting or starring role in five of Disney’s seven NFL productions. The network has aired three shows so far this season MNF games. Despite the year-on-year decline MNF only follows NBCs Football on Sunday evenings as the top-rated primetime show in the dollar demo, with 4.87 million adults ages 18-49 per game. For comparison: ABC’s, the top-rated primetime entertainment program Dancing with the starscurrently averages 942,653 adults under the age of 50.

All in all, football is each of the top three primetime slots of the young season, with NBC’s Sunday night package averaging 20.48 million linear TV viewers (or 23.3 million if streaming deliveries are taken into account), of which 6 .27 million members are the 18-49 demo. ABC’s Football on Saturday evening ranked third in the demo with an average appeal of 1.63 million adults under 50.

So far, the NFL has managed to maintain its ratings despite a heated political environment and a late-onset hurricane season that has destroyed thousands of homes and left millions without power in Gulf Coast markets and further inland. More than two million homes lost power in Florida on Wednesday evening as Hurricane Milton raged across the Sunshine State. The hardest hit areas include No. 11 Tampa/St. Petersburg market, which is home to 2.22 million television households, which is 1.8% of the nationwide base of 125.8 million households.

According to aggregated utility data from the DMA, at least 893,206 households in Tampa/St. Pete has been without power since Friday afternoon. The market covers a huge spectrum of real estate, ranging from Citrus County on the northwest central coast to Highlands County in the center of the state.