NFL RedZone Saves Us From 1.5 Days of Commercials Every NFL Season

NFL RedZone
NFL RedZone

NFL RedZone might be one of the greatest inventions sports fans have ever seen. The ability to watch the most exciting parts of every game on Sunday with no commercial interruption is fantastic. Because if we have to see that Southwest Airlines commercial with the Journey song one more time we might just throw our remote through the TV screen.

Sure, when our beloved home team is playing, it’s likely that we’ll focus in on that game, but for the most part, we’re glued to RedZone for the first two time blocks of games every week.

With NFL games now averaging approximately 65 minutes of commercials per game, we were curious how much time RedZone was saving us when it came to being inundated with advertisements.

We did some calculations and learned that RedZone subscribers are spared from 2,210 minutes of commercials every NFL season, about 37 hours, or 1.5 days.

  • The average NFL game has 63 minutes of advertisements
  • NFL RedZone broadcasts two blocks of games each Sunday
  • 63 minutes * 2 time blocks of games * 17 weeks of football = 1.5 days of commercials

[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none”]RedZone subscribers are spared from 2,210 minutes of commercials every NFL season, about 37 hours, or 1.5 days.[/tweet_box]

With commercials being about 30 seconds on average, imagine for a second living in a world where you were forced to watch that “You Don’t Own Me” Toyota advertisement 4,420 times in a row. Or maybe that Bo Jackson Kia ad that just about gives us a seizure every time it comes on each week for the fifth time.

Thank you, RedZone, for all you do to prevent this from becoming a reality.

This data from the Wall Street Journal just about sums it up, though, that commercials dominate a large portion of every NFL game:

average-nfl-commercials

So how did this all the sudden seem to get so out of hand? We think there’s two main reasons things seem worse than previous seasons.

The data actually suggests that the total number of commercials in NFL games hasn’t gone up that much from previous seasons, but that it has been a very small but gradual climb. So there’s definitely a component of the NFL and the broadcast networks just overstepping their boundaries when it comes to consumer tolerance. We might just be reaching a breaking point.

Second, though, is we now live in a world where Netflix, Hulu’s ad-free option, Amazon Prime, HBO and more offer completely commercial free viewing experiences. As an audience, we’re starting to get so used to streaming content with no advertisements, that even going back to normal television seems overbearing. Basically, now that we’re used to no ads while we consume entertainment, when we’re subject to the onslaught of commercials during an NFL game, it seems way worse than before.

With declining ratings, it will be interesting to see if the networks and the NFL work to lower the total number of ads among growing complaints from viewers.