With the usual Thursday night opener moving to Wednesday night, the final Friday night international was moved to Thursday. And the game between the 49ers and the Rams from Australia produced solid numbers, but not spectacular.
Via Eric Fisher of Sports Front Officepulled Netflix streaming 18.5 million domestic viewers and 3.2 million international viewers.
The US number matched the YouTube audience from last year’s Chiefs-Chargers game in Brazil. The foreign audience was bigger this year.
Since Netflix is a paid service and the game is streamed on YouTube for free, this is good news – even though YouTube’s numbers were widely considered disappointing.
Last December, a pair of NFL games on Christmas generated an average of 23.7 million viewers in the US.
On the one hand, Netflix’s number surpassed Amazon’s 2025 average Thursday night viewership by more than three million viewers. 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 throttled the Rams in a 27-7 game that was competitive in the first half, but not in the second.
Netflix will stream four more games this season. The next one comes in November, the night before Thanksgiving. Next, Netflix will have two Christmas games for the third year in a row. The offer ends on Saturday of the 18th week.