The NFL is here to save TV, again. But it's going to get harder every year.

• A new NFL season is here!
• TV executives are rejoicing, since the NFL is the one reliable ratings generator they have left.
• One problem: The NFL audience is aging. What happens if younger viewers don't learn to tune in?

The NFL kicked off its 2024 season Thursday night, when Kansas City took on Baltimore. Next up are games on Friday, Sunday, and Monday.

NFL season can't come soon enough for the TV industry, which shrinks every year, and depends on pro football to survive. We can't stress this enough — increasingly, the chief reason for some TV networks to exist is to transmit NFL games.

For instance: More than a third of NBC's viewing time last year was attributable to NFL games and related programming, according to analysts at MoffettNathanson. CBS was even more dependent, at 40%. And at Fox, NFL games and other "shoulder programming" accounted for an astonishing 63% of the time viewers spent with the network.

In 2016, NFL ratings took a drop, and I assumed that they were dropping for the same reason everything else on TV was dropping — TV viewers were cutting the cord, or not signing up for one in the first place, and they were spending more time on stuff like YouTube. I got that one wrong, though. Ratings bounced back in subsequent years, and the NFL remains the one thing on TV that hasn't been chopped down by the internet.

Except, if you look a little more carefully, it looks like the internet is eroding the NFL, too.

In 2015, people 49 and younger accounted for 51% of the NFL's viewing time, per MoffettNathanson's Robert Fishman. But last year, that number had shrunk to 42%.

That's not nearly as bad as the aging that the rest of TV is suffering. Per Fishman, the 49-and-younger demo's overall TV time has shrunk in half over the same timeframe — from 49% in 2015 to 24% last year.

But those trends should still worry both the NFL and the TV networks that pay it many billions of dollars every year.

Sure, the NFL can argue that younger people are engaging with the sport in ways that don't show up on TV ratings — like sports betting, or watching highlights on Instagram, etc. But to state the obvious: TV networks pay the NFL many billions of dollars because the NFL delivers TV eyeballs, not because it delivers Instagram eyeballs.

And if younger viewers are starting to tune out of the NFL — again, like they have tuned out of everything else on TV — that's going to be a problem for the league and the TV guys.