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One of the NFL’s most powerful and prominent team owners is getting the Netflix star treatment, and boosting the streamer’s sports ambitions in the process.
Netflix is reportedly paying $50 million for the rights to produce a 10-part documentary series on Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. In beating out rival entities such as ESPN and Amazon, Netflix will gain another prominent piece of sports content, which has already drawn comparisons to highly regarded series such as the Michael Jordan-focused “The Last Dance.”
The Jones project won’t advance Netflix’s extremely limited efforts to date in live sports. But with 232.5 million subscribers as of the end of the first quarter and existing hits such as “Drive to Survive” and “Full Swing,” Netflix still holds sizable sway over the entire business of streaming.
The $50 million price tag for the Jones project remains a mere fraction of the cost of any top-tier live sports rights, and would remain within the strategy of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who told an investor conference late last year, “we’re not anti-sports, we’re pro-profit.”
The Jones-Netflix project is also slated to be a key early effort between the NFL and Skydance Media, which late last year struck a broad-based content deal. The documentary is expected to focus heavily on the Cowboys’ three Super Bowl titles under Jones in the 1990s and feature interviews with former stars Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin.
Though the Cowboys haven’t reached the NFC title game since the 1995 season, the team is still the NFL’s most valuable franchise.
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