With the usual Thursday night opener moving to Wednesday night, the recent Friday night international game moved to Thursday. And the game between the 49ers and Rams from Australia did solid but not spectacular numbers.
Via Eric Fisher of Front Office Sports, the Netflix stream attracted 18.5 million domestic viewers and 3.2 million international viewers.
The U.S. number matched the YouTube audience from last year's Chiefs-Chargers game in Brazil. The foreign audience was larger this year.
Given that Netflix is a paid service and the YouTube game streamed for free, that's good news â?? even though the YouTube numbers were widely regarded as disappointing.
Last December, a pair of NFL games on Christmas generated 23.7 million U.S. viewers, on average.
On one hand, the Netflix number exceeded by more than three million viewers the 2025 Thursday night average viewership on Amazon. On the other hand, the excitement of Week 1 tends to generate bigger numbers.
It didn't help that the game wasn't very good. The 49ers slowly suffocated the Rams in a 27-7 game that was competitive in the first half but not in...