The NFL’s first Internet-only broadcast was a success, at least according to the company that streamed it.
Yahoo announced today that more than 15.2 million unique viewers watched the game, with 33.6 million streams across all devices, streaming a total of 460 million minutes of game action. According to Yahoo, about two-thirds of the streams were in the United States and about one-third were from other countries, which means the league got about 11.2 million streams from outside the U.S.
The numbers that Yahoo is pushing sound impressive, although it’s often hard to get a read on what such numbers really mean. One thing that isn’t clear is whether this made money for Yahoo, which reportedly paid the NFL $20 million for the rights to the game. Although Yahoo has said its ads sold out, that doesn’t necessarily mean they sold out at a price that turned a profit.
The NFL is expected to continue experimenting with streamed games, probably doing it again for a Sunday morning London game next year, and possibly expanding it to a Thursday night game as well. The NFL’s TV contracts with CBS for Sunday afternoon AFC games, FOX for Sunday afternoon NFC games, NBC for Sunday night games, ESPN for Monday night games and DirecTV for Sunday Ticket all run through 2022, so there will be no major shift away from traditional television toward the Internet any time soon. But streaming is the way of the future, and the NFL will continue dipping its toes in the water.
