The Rise of Television and the NFL

By 4Football Staff · October 9, 2026 · 10 min read

Pro football went from a stadium sport that feared the camera to a television product. Here is how blackouts, one court case and one law shaped the way the NFL reaches fans.

For most of its early life, professional football was a sport you watched in person or heard about on the radio. Crowds were modest, many teams struggled to stay afloat, and baseball was the country's dominant game. A few decades later, the NFL was the most-watched thing on American television, and a league that had once feared the camera could not imagine life without it.

That change did not happen smoothly. Team owners worried that showing games for free would empty their stadiums. Courts and lawmakers had to decide how far a league could go in controlling its broadcasts. The commissioner who took office in 1960 saw an opportunity that others missed. And the technology itself changed the way the game was played, officiated and understood.

This article follows the main steps: the first telecasts, the blackout fights, the court case and the law that shaped the league's business model, and the new channels that followed. It is a history rather than a guide to today's contracts, which change often. For the current picture, see How NFL Games Reach Your Screen: Broadcast Packages and Rights.

Before the camera: radio and the live crowd

Through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, radio carried football to people who could not attend. Broadcasts helped build a following, and announcers became familiar voices. But the economics of the sport rested on tickets. A pro team that played a home game wanted people to buy seats, and most teams were not wealthy. The idea of giving the game away for free sounded risky.

That caution is the root of nearly every television policy that followed. Owners were not opposed to attention; they were opposed to losing gate receipts. As television spread in the late 1940s and 1950s, the fear was that fans would stay home and watch.

1939: the first telecasts

The first televised pro football game took place on October 22, 1939, when the Brooklyn Dodgers of the NFL played the Philadelphia Eagles at Ebbets Field in New York. NBC broadcast the game on an experimental basis to the small number of television sets in the New York area at the time. The first televised college football game had been broadcast a few weeks earlier, in September 1939, when Fordham played Waynesburg.

These were experiments, not products. Very few people owned television sets, the cameras were primitive, and the picture was small and grainy. World War II then slowed the development of the technology. When television began to spread across American homes after the war, football was among the programs that helped sell sets.

The early 1950s: the Rams experiment and the blackout

By 1950, television was growing quickly, and teams had to decide what to do about it. The Los Angeles Rams became the first NFL team to televise its entire home schedule. The result is commonly told as a cautionary tale: attendance dropped, and the team changed its approach. The Rams' experience convinced many owners that unrestricted local telecasts of home games were a threat to the gate, though economists and historians continue to discuss how much television alone explained the decline.

The response was the blackout, a rule that prevented a game from being shown on television in the area around the home team's stadium. The logic was simple. If you wanted to watch the game, you had to buy a ticket. Blackouts were an early and enduring feature of the league's relationship with television.

In 1951, the NFL championship game between the Rams and the Cleveland Browns was televised coast to coast on the DuMont network, the first time the league's title game had gone out nationally. The Rams won. The audience was small by modern standards, but the game showed that football could work as a national event on television.

The court case of 1953

The league's practice of controlling broadcasts drew a legal challenge. In 1953, a federal court in Philadelphia ruled in a case brought by the government against the NFL. The decision allowed the league to black out home games in the home team's territory, which protected the gate. But it limited the league's ability to restrict broadcasts of other games into areas where those games were not being played. In effect, the court said that protecting the home gate was acceptable and that other restraints went too far.

That compromise shaped the sport for decades. It meant that each team could keep its home games off local television, and it left open a question that would reappear later: whether the league could sell its rights as a group. The case is sometimes cited in broadcasting and sports-law textbooks as an early landmark.

Building a national audience

During the 1950s, regular-season games were televised on a team-by-team or regional basis, and the picture varied from city to city. DuMont carried games for a time, and CBS began broadcasting regular-season games in the middle of the decade. The league's most important broadcast of the era, though, was its championship game.

The 1958 title game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, which ended in the sport's first sudden-death overtime, was carried nationally by NBC and drew a huge audience for its time. Many historians see it as the moment the league captured the national imagination. For the full account, see The 1958 NFL Championship Game and the Sport's Turning Point.

That growth in attention was important because it changed the value of the product. As more viewers tuned in, networks and advertisers began to see the league as a vehicle for reaching a mass audience. And that raised the question of who should negotiate with them.

Rozelle and the shared contract

Pete Rozelle became the NFL commissioner in 1960. He understood something that mattered enormously: if each team sold its own broadcast rights, big-city teams would earn far more than small-town teams, and the gap would grow over time. A team in a large market could command high fees, while a team in a small market might struggle to attract a buyer at all. The league's competitive balance, and its long-term health, depended on a different model.

Rozelle's solution was to pool the teams' television rights into a single package, sell it to a network, and divide the money among the teams. In 1961, the league signed a pooled deal with CBS. A federal judge ruled that the arrangement violated the earlier court order in the 1953 case, since it restrained the teams from selling rights individually.

The league turned to Congress. In September 1961, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which gave professional leagues limited protection from antitrust law when they sold their television rights as a pooled package. The law is brief, but its impact was large. It made the shared national contract possible and allowed the NFL to centralize the way it sold the game.

The result is the central fact of NFL economics. Television revenue is shared among all the teams, which helps explain why a team in a small market can compete financially with one in a huge city. For the connection to the league's broader finances, see NFL Revenue Sharing and Why Small Markets Can Compete.

How television changed the game itself

Television did more than carry the game; it changed it.

• Commercial breaks. The need to fit advertising into broadcasts led to scheduled pauses in play. Fans notice the rhythm of kickoff, commercial, play, commercial. The pace of a modern game is partly a product of this arrangement.
• Instant replay. The technique of replaying a play on the broadcast was first used in a college game, the Army-Navy game of 1963, on CBS. It began as a way to show viewers what they had just seen and later became the basis for officiating review in the pro game.
• Slow motion and camera angles. Slow motion, multiple angles and close-ups taught viewers to see the game differently. A fan watching at home often had a better view of a play than someone in the stands.
• Film and storytelling. Companies like NFL Films, which grew from a small operation in the 1960s, developed a style of slow-motion footage, music and narration that made the game look cinematic and helped build the league's image.
• Scheduling. Kickoff times, prime-time games and the arrangement of the weekly schedule all reflect the needs of broadcasters. The best-known example is the weekly Monday night game, which began in 1970 and is covered in Monday Night Football: History and Impact.

Each of these changes was driven by the same basic idea: to put on a better show for a viewer at home. In turn, the viewer became the most important customer.

The era of more channels

From the 1980s onward, the number of ways to watch grew, and so did the number of bidders.

Several of these steps were significant. When Fox outbid the incumbent network for the NFC package in the early 1990s, it signaled that the league's games were so valuable that a new network could build its identity around them. The Sunday Ticket package, introduced in 1994, addressed the old problem that fans in one city could only see the local team's games, which had been a constraint since the early blackout era.

The details of today's contracts, including which networks and services carry which games, change regularly and are subject to negotiations. Rather than relying on a historical summary, check the league's announcements for the current setup.

The end of the blackout

The blackout rule lasted for decades, but it gradually weakened. In 1973, Congress passed a law that required home games to be televised locally if they were sold out 72 hours before kickoff, a rule that rewarded teams for filling their stadiums. In later years, the government and the league reconsidered the logic. The Federal Communications Commission removed its sports blackout rules in 2014, and the NFL suspended its blackout policy in the following year. Since then, blackouts of home games have not been a regular part of the league's practice, though you should confirm how a particular game will be shown.

The history of the blackout shows how far the league's view of television had changed. What began as a fear of empty seats ended as an understanding that television coverage drives interest in tickets and merchandise.

Common misconceptions

1. "Television nearly killed pro football." Owners feared it, and the Rams' early experience fed that fear, but the long-run result was the opposite: television built the audience that made the league wealthy.
2. "The first telecast was a major event." It reached very few viewers. Its importance is in hindsight.
3. "Blackouts were a league invention with no legal basis." The 1953 court decision approved home-territory blackouts specifically, which is why they lasted.
4. "The Sports Broadcasting Act lets the league do anything it wants." The law is narrow. It covers the sale of certain broadcast rights as a pooled package, and it does not give leagues blanket immunity from antitrust law.
5. "Radio faded away." Radio broadcasts continued alongside television and remain a loyal way to follow a team, especially for fans who are driving or away from a screen.
6. "Everything about the schedule is for television." Many scheduling decisions also reflect stadium availability, travel and competitive fairness, though broadcasters have a large voice.

A last point is worth remembering. Television turned the NFL into a business that depends on the attention of a national audience, and that dependence still shapes its decisions, from kickoff times to rule changes that favor action. It also explains why the league guards its broadcast rights so carefully, and why disputes over who may show a game, and where, have been part of the sport for as long as the cameras have been there.

What it means for fans

The practical effect of this history is that football is one of the easiest sports to follow from home. Most games are on broadcast or cable television, some are on streaming platforms, and highlights and statistics are available at all times. But the same history also explains why viewing can be complicated. Rights are divided among several companies, and where you live and which service you pay for can determine what you can watch.

Our own site can help you follow along without needing to track every channel. The scores page carries live results, the schedule page lists games, and the standings page shows how teams compare.

The short version

• The first televised pro game was played on October 22, 1939, between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles, broadcast on an experimental basis.
• In the early 1950s, owners feared that free telecasts would hurt attendance, so the league used blackouts to protect the home gate.
• A 1953 federal court decision allowed home blackouts but limited other broadcast restrictions.
• The 1958 championship game, shown nationally, helped turn the league into a major attraction.
• Commissioner Pete Rozelle pooled the teams' rights, and the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 gave the league legal protection to sell them as a package.
• Shared television revenue is a key reason small-market teams can compete with big-city teams.
• Cable, a new network, satellite packages and streaming widened the audience, and the blackout rule faded after 2014. Check current announcements for how a given game is shown.