Back in May, days after Netflix picked up the rights to carry two NFL games on Christmas Day, the streamer’s top production executives began reaching out to network suits at CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN for a little help. And, in many ways, these phone calls represented the precarious and unbelievably fraught inflection point upon which the sports media industry now finds itself balancing.

Netflix is slowly but surely priming itself to become a player in live sports, taking its time progressing from sports-adjacent content (Drive to Survive and Quarterback) to event sports (WWE) to sampling very major sports, like the NFL. And while I previously reported that Netflix was interested in a bespoke NBA package, such as the league’s in-season tournament, the company was eventually scared off by the capital expenditure required to produce 67 games. Netflix, at least for now, views itself as a streaming company that can handle one-offs, like a golf or a tennis match, but it’s not in the capital intensive live-events business. Thus, its executives’ calls to network honchos asking for their help standing up those Christmas games.