Netflix had a seminal moment in the company’s history on Wednesday with its highly successful Christmas Day streaming of an NFL doubleheader. The stock market, however, has already largely recognized the company’s many accomplishments this year, and Friday’s market action did not include any sort of incremental NFL bump. 

Shares in the streaming giant fell by 1.8% Friday, closing at $907.55 per share, in what was the market’s first chance to respond formally to Nielsen data released late Thursday showing that Netflix averaged more than 24 million viewers for the two NFL games—setting a new mark for the most-streamed NFL games in U.S. history.

Often, big news like that would immediately send shares upward, particularly given that the NFL games are a foundational piece in Netflix’s broader ambitions in live-event streaming and the advertising business that goes with it. But in what was a generally lighter day of market activity amid the holiday week, the football success is largely pre-baked into the current valuation.

The slide for Netflix shares on Friday, following a separate drop of nearly 1% the day before, was part of a broader market decline. Even with this retreat, Netflix stock has increased nearly 94% this year. 

Analysts, meanwhile, believe there is still plenty of room for growth for Netflix’s earnings and stock price in 2025, particularly if price increases happen for the first time since January 2022—joining a series of major streaming services that have done in recent months. During the company’s last earnings call with analysts, Netflix co-president Greg Peters said “we love the low price point and increased accessibility that comes with our ad plan. It represents an incredible value.” But expectations are growing for that stance to change, at least somewhat. 

“Based on U.S. price points, Netflix is still roughly half the cost per hour of cable TV, and materially lower than movie tickets,” wrote KeyBanc. 

“With more live events coming, we believe the probability of price increases is increasing,” the firm’s analysts said. 

Different Situation

The rather muted market reaction to the NFL metrics Friday differs materially from what happened last month after Netflix’s release of internal data related to the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match. 

Even as that event suffered from widespread buffering issues, Netflix shares still rose by 3% after the release of the highly debated audience metrics, reaching another in what had been a series of company records.

Basketball is often a game of runs, and the NBA just had a big one in its viewership with the five-game slate on Christmas Day. But will it be enough to redefine the season and its current image?

Even in the wake of historic, and much larger, totals for the NFL and its streaming debut on Netflix with four Super Bowl contenders, the NBA’s average of 5.25 million viewers for its Christmas games soared by 84% from a year ago. That draw was capped with the Lakers’ win over the Warriors, which was the most-watched Christmas Day NBA game in five years at 7.76 million.

Perhaps most impactful, though, was the material shift in the NBA’s year-over-year viewership decline, which shrank from 18% before Christmas to just 4%. What had been a defining storyline of the season, even after striking transformative media rights deals kicking in next year, could soon become something else entirely.

“The NBA that everyone has grown to know and love was on display [Wednesday],” former NBA player Matt Barnes said on Instagram, part of a still-growing series of major stars that are speaking publicly on the viewership issue, and he praised the high quality of play happening throughout the day and night.

“I think it’s [commissioner] Adam Silver’s job to figure out how to bottle that up and keep the momentum,” he said.

A key factor for the NBA will be to retain at least some of this holiday energy through the next six weeks—a period traditionally dominated by the NFL playoffs—until the All-Star Game weekend, set for Feb. 14-16 in San Francisco, when basketball returns to the forefront of sports conversation. 

Postseason Watch

The individual NBA game ratings from Wednesday, meanwhile, also reaffirmed how important LeBron James, turning 40 on Monday, and 36-year-old Steph Curry still are to the league.

As the Lakers and Warriors led the way on the holiday viewership, each player starred again as James scored 31 points and Curry had a game-leading 38 in the 115-113 win for Los Angeles. Both teams, however, are still squarely on the playoff bubble. The Lakers are in sixth place in the Western Conference, only a tiebreaker removed from the play-in tournament, while the Warriors are in 10th, just a half-game out of missing the postseason entirely. 

The league’s fans, however, have yet to fully move on to the next generation of stars, and would be advantaged significantly by one or both of the aging stars and their teams reaching the playoffs and making a meaningful run.