Netflix is soon to enter its sports era as it looks at subscriber acquisition: The world’s biggest streaming platform will be streaming two NFL games on Christmas Day this year, making it the latest to adopt the use of sports broadcasting as a strategy to attract more subscribers, Netflix said recently.

What are we expecting to see? Last January, Netflix announced becoming the exclusive platform for WWE’s Raw, their flagship weekly wrestling show, starting next January. This seemingly ideal investment cost them USD 5 bn. “Raw is year-round, which is part of what makes it such an attractive property,” Tom Richardson, senior vice president of Mercury Intermedia, told Front Office Sports. “It delivers a ton of content.”

Netflix has slowly started diversifying its live action events: “Last year, we decided to take a big [leap] on live — tapping into massive fandoms across comedy, reality TV, sports and more,” says Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria tells the New York Times. One of these was Selective Outrage, their live comedy special with Chris Rock, which was later nominated for an Emmy.

There’s already a ton of similar agreements out there between all sorts of streaming platforms and sports associations, including Apple and FIFA, Amazon Prime and the NBA, as well as Walt Disney Company and Fox Corp who have joined to create a Sports-Streaming Venture. These agreements are all based on the same goal of giving their viewers the streaming rights to their favorite sports and attracting new sports fans to their platforms.

The strategy makes sense: Media consumers (read: the entire human race) have been shifting away from traditional cable TV. What usually brings them back to it is live sports. This was clear with the start of the US’s national football season, where broadcast sports viewership rose by 360%, in comparison to 222% during the same period the year before, according to CNBC.

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