Rejoice, Football Fans: NFL Now Is Here

12 National Football League (NFL) teams will play their first preseason games tonight, and for fans who won’t be able to tune in, the NFL is offering a powerful new platform stuffed full of highlights and analysis. The most lucrative sports league in the world has debuted NFL Now, a new video site that can be customized to each fan’s liking.

NFL Now was first announced a few days before the Super Bowl, and it represents the league’s effort to make a big investment in online video content. Unlike the other three leagues that are considered a part of North America’s “Big Four“, the NFL does not run its own YouTube channel, and while NFL Now does not run through the world’s largest video site, it has a huge library and a pretty nifty player that minimizes as the user scrolls through.

One of the biggest selling points of NFL Now is its flexibility. The videos range from highlights to recaps to fantasy football updates to scripted series like Hard Knocks, all of which can be selected into or out of a user’s personal stream. Of course, content can also be filtered by team, as the NFL claims it will provide 4,800 minutes of content for each team each week. That’s almost equal to the amount of time it takes to play the last two minutes of a close game.

In case that massive watch time doesn’t get the point across, NFL Now is big. The league claims the new site has been in development for years, and it’s easy to see why. As an NFL fan myself, I’m eager to take the new site out for a spin, especially once the regular season begins on September 4th.