With Christmas right around the corner, the NFL and NBC will be delivering a special present for football fans this week: They've made the unprecedented decision to eliminate all commercials during the fourth quarter of the Bills-Chargers game on Saturday night.
There's a good reason why that game was chosen for the NFL's commercial-free experiment and it's because Bills-Chargers will be the first game ever to air exclusively on NBC's Peacock streaming service. When the NFL's new media deal kicked in this year, one of the key components for NBC was that Peacock would get one exclusive game per year from 2023 through 2028.
This week's game in Los Angeles will kick off Peacock's exclusive coverage and NBC is going all-out by having its No. 1 announcing team of Mike Tirico, Cris Collinsworth and Melissa Stark calling the game. NBC also has the Bengals-Steelers game on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. ET and the network could have sent its top team there, but it's pretty clear they wanted to make a big deal out of Peacock's first exclusive NFL game.
Overall, the expectation is that there will be a 40% reduction in commercial time during the Bills-Chargers game, which kicks off at 8 p.m. ET. Not only will NFL fans be thrilled to see fewer commercials, but it's also a plus for people who are covering the game, like Rob Hyland, the coordinating producer for NBC's "Sunday Night Football."
"The limited stoppages are exciting for me as someone that wants to tell the story of the game and have the time to do it," Hyland said, via the AP.
The plan for the fourth quarter is for NBC to kick things off with a branded moment from its main sponsors (Hyundai, Capital One and Walmart) and then go ad-free after that. Although there won't be any commercials, the normal commercial breaks will still be in place, but instead of getting ads, NBC will feature some NFL-related talk from its studio team. Tirico, Collinsworth and Stark will also get a chance to take a deeper dive into the game's earlier storylines.
Although this is the first exclusive Peacock game of the season, it won't be the last. The streaming service will also be the exclusive provider of an NFL wild card game that will be played on Saturday, Jan. 13. As of right now, NBC hasn't announced if that game will also be going commercial-free in the fourth quarter.
