For NFL fans, RedZone Channel has been beloved in large part because it was, as we were always assured at the start of the broadcast, “Seven hours of commercial-free football.” The football is no longer commercial-free, and that makes RedZone Channel worse.
The league experimented with RedZone commercials on one Sunday last season, and despite widespread complaints from fans, this season the NFL has decided to put commercials on RedZone every Sunday.
The result: More money for the NFL, and a lesser experience for viewers.
After the NFL announced that RedZone would no longer be commercial-free, there was a concerted propaganda effort from the league office minimizing how much those commercials would interfere with the games. We were told it would be only four 15-second commercials, shown on a split screen with game action on the other half of the screen.
But the reality is any commercial interruption takes fans out of the experience of being completely immersed in football, which is the whole reason so many fans love it. And despite that spin that ads would be limited to spots on a split screen, there actually were times today when RedZone was devoted solely to advertising and not to football.
Late in the day, with four games still being played and three of them going down to the wire, RedZone went to an advertisement that had a sponsor’s logo taking up the whole screen while host Scott Hanson read a promo. Those late-game moments are when RedZone is at its best, providing fans with up-to-the-second action. Those are not the moments when fans want to see and hear a sponsor’s message.
The people who spend all day watching RedZone are some of the NFL’s biggest fans. The NFL has shown it wants to squeeze every dollar it can out of those fans, even if it means making a product the fans love worse.
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