NFL Streaming on Sprint

The National Football League will be offering programming to Sprint customers this fall. It's unclear who is paying who here. My guess is Sprint is paying the NFL in order to try to stem the flow of customers off their network. That said, the revenue the NFL might be generating from Sprint is surely de minimis given the scale of advertising dollars spent around football. - How big a deal is this? We don't know anything about the money side, but let's look at it from a user perspective. Let's do some math and figure it out.

Data Points:

There are ~300 million people in the US.

There are roughly 265 million of them with cell phones.

Sprint has roughly a 20% market share.

The NFL program requires a data plan. Let's say Sprint sells a data plan to 20% of their customers.

The NFL program requires users to install a handset application.

So now let's do the math...

20% of 265 million is 53 million Sprint subscribers. The 20% of Sprint subs with data are ~ 10 million users. So under the best of circumstances the maximum audience for the Sprint/NFL program is 3.8% of the cellular market.

Now when you start to add in the handset install... Maybe you can reach 2% of the market. Is 2% a big deal? Nope, if you're talking about a mainstream application like American Football, 2% is a niche app.

The NFL would be far better off doing a distribution deal with a carrier agnostic platform such as Foneshow. We can reach better than 95% of US cellular users. We don't require a data plan. We don't require a handset install.