Written By | Sports Desk
ABC and ESPN will share the NFL's biggest night for the first time. Now the streaming simulcast tells us where sports TV is heading.
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Disney's first Super Bowl in two decades just became its widest-reaching one. On Wednesday, the company confirmed that Disney+ will stream the ESPN/ABC telecast of Super Bowl LXI, along with the Spanish-language ESPN Deportes broadcast, according to Sports Media Watch. The game will also stream on the ESPN App.
The announcement settles a question that was open as recently as June. When Disney's advertising chief discussed the company's Super Bowl plans with Axios at Cannes, only ABC and ESPN were confirmed, and an earlier report that Disney+ and Hulu would carry the game had been corrected. Four months out from kickoff, Disney+ is now officially in the plan.
A first for ESPN, a return for ABC
The game is scheduled for Feb. 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. It will air on ABC for the first time since 2006, and on ESPN for the first time ever. That second fact is the one ESPN executives keep returning to. Burke Magnus, ESPN's president of content, said in 2024 that the network has never produced a Super Bowl and wants to redefine what covering one looks like.
ESPN has been building toward this for a while. The network hired Troy Aikman and Joe Buck from Fox on five-year contracts, reportedly worth $95 million and $65 million respectively, and has said it is hiring a dedicated vice president for the Super Bowl. Magnus has also said he wants Peyton and Eli Manning to anchor a ManningCast on ESPN2, and a menu of alternate viewing options is expected. This week's announcement concerns the main telecasts only; Disney has not detailed those extras in the coverage reviewed for this article.
The streaming scoreboard
Disney+ joins a short but growing list of streaming homes for the game. Peacock streamed it last season, Tubi the season before, and Paramount+ three years ago. Each has served as a test of how many people will watch the NFL's marquee event on an app instead of a cable box.
How those viewers are counted matters. According to Sports Business Journal, as cited by Sports Media Watch, the Disney+ simulcast will be included in the Nielsen-reported figure, as Peacock was last year and Tubi was two years ago. Peacock had previously been measured separately by Adobe Analytics. For advertisers and for the league, one blended number is easier to compare year over year, and it keeps the record-setting headline intact.
Beyond the U.S. border
The streams will be offered in 55 markets, including Brazil, Latin America and South Africa. For a league that has spent years courting international fans, that is a meaningful extension: it puts an American football broadcast, with an English and a Spanish-language option, inside a subscription service many fans already pay for.
Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro framed the strategy broadly, calling live sports "a fan engagement and ecosystem play" in addition to a way of driving viewership, per Sports Media Watch. In other words, the Super Bowl is meant to pull people into the Disney+ app and keep them there.
More NFL on Disney+
The Super Bowl is not the only league content heading to the service. Two regular-season Monday Night Football games will stream on Disney+, including Cowboys-Eagles in Week 7; the second game has not been determined. ESPN has also announced select college football simulcasts on Disney+ that do not require an ESPN subscription.
Disney is airing NFL games under a 10-year deal reportedly worth $2.7 billion per year. The league can opt out after the 2030 season, which ends with Disney airing its next Super Bowl. That gives the company a clear window to prove its model works.
A blessing and a curse: the ad market
Demand is not the problem. Rita Ferro, Disney's president of global advertising, told Axios in June that half of the Super Bowl audience is women, and that the game landing on Valentine's Day and a long weekend gives brands a chance to tell stories differently. She described demand as "a blessing and a curse," with more interest than available ad units. Disney has also said it plans a live ESPN studio on Santa Monica Pier for the week before the game.
Disney's other rights give it a showcase to sell from: the Grammys starting next year, the Oscars through 2028, and the CMAs through 2032.
What this means for you
If you are a fan, the practical upshot is choice. Whether you use an antenna for ABC, a cable package for ESPN, or a Disney+ login on a phone or smart TV, you will be able to find the game, and Spanish-language viewers have an official stream on the same service. If you travel for work, the 55-market footprint means a better chance of catching the game abroad.
If you host a watch party, expect the usual caveat: streams often run behind the broadcast, so a group split across devices may hear a cheer before it sees the play. If you are a cord-cutter weighing subscriptions, Disney+ is now a real option for the NFL's biggest night as well as selected games this autumn.
The bottom line
The Super Bowl is no longer one channel's property. Disney is spreading its first game in 20 years across broadcast, cable, an app and a streaming service, in two languages and dozens of countries. Whether the audience follows in record numbers will be known on Valentine's night; what is already clear is that the league's biggest event is now designed to be watched everywhere at once.
