If there have been any doubt about what viewers need, the numbers from the 2025 soccer season have made it clear: Americans need to watch their groups without cost on native broadcast TV, accessible to all with out obstacles.
FOX delivered its best NFL regular season in a decade, averaging 19.6 million viewers and up 6% 12 months over 12 months. Its “America’s Game of the Week” topped that, averaging 25.3 million viewers. CBS set a new regular-season record with 21.3 million common viewers. And ABC notched its highest bowl game ratings in more than 12 years, with the Pop-Tarts and Citrus Bowls drawing greater than 8 million viewers every. These sturdy rankings are a powerful endorsement of protecting reside sports activities on broadcast tv, free and accessible to all.
Rooting for our favourite sports activities groups is a shared American expertise. During the vacations, FOX’s Thanksgiving Day broadcast in Detroit drew almost 48 million viewers, the second-largest Thanksgiving NFL viewers ever and the most important ever for the early window. Later that day, CBS aired the most-watched NFL regular-season sport in historical past, when the Chiefs vs. Cowboys sport averaged 57.2 million viewers. If these video games had been unique to streaming platforms, tens of hundreds of thousands of followers – particularly in rural areas with unreliable broadband entry or households with out costly streaming packages – would have been shut out.
Watching your favourite video games shouldn’t be arduous. As platforms pile up and choices splinter, followers need sports activities to be easy, inexpensive and simple for the entire family to entry. They need to know the place to tune in and hold watching collectively with out additional charges or hassles.
Local stations are nonetheless probably the most dependable, inclusive and broadly accessible approach for followers to take pleasure in reside sports activities without cost. Sports followers are calling on Washington to stand with their native stations and hold the video games on native channels – you possibly can, too. Take action now to help keep live sports on broadcast TV.