On October 25th, the Jacksonville Jaguars defeated the Buffalo Bills in a game that began at 9:30 AM EST. The game was not just significant as one of three NFL matchups that will be played at London’s Wembley Stadium this year; it was also the first NFL to ever be broadcast exclusively via live stream. In June, Yahoo announced its plan to stream the game, and it followed through, offering up a free feed that reportedly reached 15.2 million unique viewers.
On the surface, that number seems huge. It beat out the October 19th presentation of ESPN’s Monday Night Football, which counted 13.9 million viewers. In total, Yahoo’s stream received 33.6 million total viewers, and averaged 2.36 million of them per minute. NBC’s live stream of last year’s Super Bowl, for comparison, topped out around 1.3 million concurrent viewers.
The popularity of Yahoo’s stream was aided by a number of factors, including the presence of more than five million international viewers; an exclusive 9 AM timeslot that featured no other NFL matchups; a close, exciting game that ended with a 34-31 Jacksonville victory; the high quality of the live stream itself, which prompted NFL fans to create a “Yahoo appreciation thread” on Reddit; and, perhaps, the presence of fans who would have otherwise streamed the game illegally.
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“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, NFL’s senior VP of media strategy, business development and sales.
At the same time, there are questions about how popular Yahoo’s live stream really was. Variety noted that Yahoo automatically streamed the game on its homepage and several of its apps, thus creating some unwitting viewers in the process. Also, the game’s average viewership-per-minute was likely much lower than a typical NFL broadcast, though Yahoo and the NFL did not release enough data to confirm or deny that hypothesis.
Here’s the bottom line: Yahoo’s NFL live stream seems like it was a worthwhile experiment for both companies involved, but it’s not going to incite a live-streaming football revolution just yet. Luckily for the NFL, it has several more international games planned, so it will have numerous opportunities to further test the live-streaming waters.
