Tom Brady Roast Proves Netflix Sports Strategy Works

Netflix released data last week on its most popular TV series and films in the first half of 2024, and sports documentaries proved wildly popular.

The most-watched sports show was The Roast of Tom Brady in May, a live offering that drew 22.4 million views in the U.S. alone. The event ranked 26th overall in total views of any TV show or series (individual seasons of a show are ranked separately in Netflix’s data). The roast marked a huge success for Netflix because the streamer proved it can pull a hefty audience for live sports content, even for things that aren’t very hard to produce (compared to a game broadcast).

The sixth season of Drive to Survive, the series that launched Formula One into the international spotlight, released in February and had 11.6 million views; the first season of the 2022 World Cup docuseries Captains of the World, debuting just before the new year, got 8.7 million views; and the first season of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader docuseries, called America’s Sweethearts and released in June, scored six million views.

Other popular shows were Together: Treble Winners, the Manchester City series that premiered in April, and the second season of Full Swing, which Netflix released in March and follows pro golfers on and off the course—both got close to five million views. The results follow a broader Netflix trend in that original series tend to perform well, while the company is stretching further into live offerings. To put these numbers in perspective, the streamer’s most-watched shows of the first half of 2024 were the first season of the mystery thriller Fool Me Once, with 107.5 million views, and the third season of Bridgerton, with nearly 92 million views. Both are original to Netflix.

Netflix is gearing up for its first of three Christmas Days airing NFL matchups. It reportedly paid $75 million each for two games this year—Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans—and got the rights for at least one in both 2025 and 2026. It’s the streaming giant’s first foray into live sports rights for one of the main U.S. sports leagues. It produced made-for-TV events The Netflix Cup and The Netflix Slam, made a deal to start streaming WWE’s flagship show Raw in 2025, and got rights for the one-on-one matchups of Joey Chestnut–Takeru Kobayashi (hot-dog eating) and Mike Tyson–Jake Paul.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said Wednesday before the data drop that he thinks the Christmas games and other live events including sports can double Netflix’s viewership.

Analysts see live sports as a huge return on investment for Netflix. The Christmas games give the streamer a big opportunity to test out natural commercial breaks that attract advertisers while spending only 2% of the total it has for content every year, according to recent research reports by investment bank Jefferies. Given the NFL’s TV viewership dominance and the success of Peacock and Christmas games last year, the games are less risky than costly films that don’t always perform well, like The Gray Man and Red Notice, the analysts say.

“Looking forward, we expect [Netflix] to have interest in rights where it can stay within its content budget as it builds out its advertising tier,” Jefferies analysts said in a May report. “Similar to the WWE deal, we see F1, golf, soccer, tennis, and boxing as examples of the types of rights that would fit into Netflix’s strategy.”

The analysts said in August that they think Netflix could increase prices before the end of the year, largely due to the combination of sports (NFL and WWE) and popular shows (Squid Game and Stranger Things) coming out in December and January.

Netflix isn’t going into its first NFL games alone. CBS Sports is going to produce the games this year for the streamer. The commentators haven’t been announced yet. “We plan to Netflix-ify them a little bit,” Sarandos’s co-CEO Greg Peters said Friday about the Christmas games. “So we’ll plan to have a little bit of stuff around the games with our talent, stuff like that, that’ll hopefully make it super fun.”

A representative for Netflix declined to comment on this story.