Connected TV
NFL RedZone hits 300: Watching fewer commercials doesn’t mean seeing fewer ads
RedZone still lets you spend an entire day jumping between every game without sitting through each broadcast's commercials.
If you were watching NFL RedZone this Sunday, you may have noticed an on-screen graphic marking its 300th episode and a tally of 17,800 touchdowns and more than 2,000 hours of coverage since its 2009 debut. You also may have noticed the graphic carried a Chase logo.
It looked something like this:
For most of those 300 episodes, RedZone promised viewers seven hours of commercial-free football. But regular split-screen commercials arrived in 2025, the same year Disney-owned ESPN announced its deal for NFL Network and RedZone’s pay-TV distribution rights. The deal closed in January 2026; the NFL said its decision to add commercials was unrelated to the acquisition. RedZone still lets you spend an entire day jumping between every game without sitting through each broadcast’s commercials.
RedZone has a massive audience. It reached an estimated 20.3 million U.S. households during the 2025 regular season, according to Samba TV research published Sept. 29. The stat counts the number of households RedZone reached over the season, including homes that also watched other NFL broadcasts too.
If you watch your team’s early game and switch to RedZone for the late games, you may spend six or seven hours watching football. During the early game, you see the commercials carried by that broadcast. When you flip over to RedZone, you see its own limited sponsored ad placements instead of the commercial breaks from the main broadcasts.
However, multiview from YouTubeTV gives you another way to move between games. It lets you put up to four channels on one screen at once and choose which one you hear. When one game goes to a commercial, you can mute it and turn up the volume of another without losing sight of the first.
The commercial will still be on the screen, in a smaller window with no sound, while a play from another game has your attention. So the time you are spending watching football hasn’t actually changed, but the ads you hear and may (or may not) notice have. For companies buying commercials during individual broadcasts, reaching you, the consumer, becomes more challenging because it solely depends on your behavior. Do you flip to RedZone or another game during a commercial break? Do you get frustrated because your team is down big and just flip to a different game or game(s)?
How much advertising gets through?
During RedZone’s first broadcast of the 2026 regular season, Sports Business Journal reporter Josh Carpenter counted four 15-second split-screen commercials across roughly seven hours. That comes to about nine seconds of commercials per hour, with football still visible beside the ad.
An NFL-specific benchmark comes from Kantar’s 2020 Super Bowl analysis. It put a regular, run of the mill, regular-season telecast at about 185 minutes, which includes about 43 minutes of commercials. That shakes out to about 14 commercial minutes per hour.
When you compare it with RedZone’s first broadcast of the 2026 regular season, the numbers show how differently those formats can split an hour between coverage and commercials. What they don’t do is establish an exact percentage in the reduction of viewers today.
That one minute of commercials also leaves out the sponsorships. Those are the brand names you see on graphics and segments, including the Chase logo on Sunday’s anniversary graphic above. They can still show up while you continue watching the coverage you came for.
The brands that stay on screen
Sports Business Journal’s analysis of the Nov. 30, 2025, broadcast found Accenture’s name on a Top Five Plays of the Day package that ran about three minutes, longer than all eight 15-second split-screen commercials shown during the game windows combined.
The same broadcast also included eight banner ads that lasted about 20 seconds each, adding about two minutes and 40 seconds with brands on screen beyond the commercial spots.
Lowe’s, another advertiser, appeared in that RedZone broadcast through a 30-second segment called “Earn Your Sunday.” A fan watching RedZone could see the company’s name during that segment without watching a single commercial on one of the individual game broadcasts.
Separately, Lowe’s also runs commercials featuring NFL players and sponsors NBC’s “Football Night in America” pregame show. This mix puts them in several places across NFL coverage, as Adweek reported in September.
So, if you switch from watching your favorite team to RedZone, you might leave one of Lowe’s commercials behind but still see the brand on a sponsored segment or a banner that wraps the RedZone stream. And, if you tune in for the evening pregame show, you may see them there, too. Lowe’s has proven that it has more than one way to reach you as you spend your Sunday binging football regardless of where you are watching.