The NFL is big business, but the live streaming of those games could become really lucrative on the advertising front.
Yahoo and the NFL announced Monday morning that the first-ever live stream football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Buffalo Bills Sunday in London, which attracted 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million total views.
“It’s been a great opportunity to partner with the NFL and deliver a truly exceptional global live streaming experience for our users,” said Adam Cahan, Yahoo’s SVP of Product and Engineering, said in a release. “We’re seeing a dramatic shift in the industry as audiences’ primary video watching moves away from TV. We were thrilled to join the NFL in setting a new standard for sports programming for our users and advertisers.”
Satellite and cable companies should be shaking in their boots at the thought of consumers now being able to watch NFL packages from the mobile app or laptops exclusively.
“We’re a lot closer to the internet being a real, legitimate distribution platform for NFL games than we were one or two years ago,” NFL executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp told The MMQB’s Peter King.
“We’re thrilled with the results of our initial step distributing an NFL game to a worldwide audience and with the work of our partner, Yahoo,” said Hans Schroeder, Senior Vice President, Media Strategy, Business Development & Sales for the NFL. “We are incredibly excited by the fact that we took a game that would have been viewed by a relatively limited television audience in the United States and by distributing it digitally were able to attract a global audience of over 15 million viewers.”
The 15.2 million unique viewers is on par with the Thursday Night Football average (17.6 million) and Monday Night Football average (13.5 million), per King.
By Glenn Erby
