An extremely strange occurrence happened for all NFL RedZone customers on Sunday. For the first time ever in its history, NFL RedZone aired commercials. Yes, that is correct.
RedZone has been around for over a decade and their motto has always been, “Seven hours of commercial free football start now!”
Only, that wasn’t true this time. This past week was filled with commercials. So what’s going on? An NFL Media spokesperson told Sportico that the league wanted to run “test” ads from major companies: Gatorade, Visa, Lowe’s, and Verizon among them.
Naturally, being a test, they want to see if they can get away with it. After all, many users are already paying a premium for RedZone – if you get it through NFL+ for example, it will set you back a C-note for the year.
So will they get away with it? Judging by the reactions online, fans are not at all impressed with this added commercialization.
Social Media Reaction
As you might imagine, social media was beyond outraged. Check out some of the reaction.
The Football Zebras immediately threw a flag on the play.
NFL Memes bemoaned our postmodern society overall:
It was beyond bizarre to see commercials on the one platform everyone uses to escape commercials.
Whether commercials are aired along with game action in the long term remains to be seen. On the bright side, if anyone did see these commercials this past weekend, maybe it gave some good ideas for last-minute Christmas shopping?
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