Leave it to the NFL to keep pushing the envelope to enhance fans' viewing experience.
Continuing with its International Series, the league will show its October 25th Buffalo Bills-Jacksonville Jaguars' game from London's Wembley Stadium via a first-ever global live stream, as reported by The Verge. And the NFL's partner in the grand experiment won't be YouTube...it's Yahoo.
That's right, Yahoo will live stream the game for free as the only option to view the Week-7 clash, unless you reside in Buffalo or Jacksonville. The stream will be available via smartphones, desktop, smart TVs and set-top boxes. Gridiron fans back in the United States will have to wake up on a Sunday morning—9:30a.m.—to catch the game.
The NFL is viewing the collaboration with Yahoo as a new distribution experiment, but doesn't plan on changing the look of the broadcast to especially fit the streaming model.
"We've had national windows before, but not necessarily a global window," Vishal Shah, the NFL's VP of digital media business development, told The Verge. "It will look and feel and be delivered to the fans traditionally as a high-quality production would go. The talent, the storylines, the knowledge base of both the commentators and the ability to access information are going to be there."
Meanwhile, Yahoo will almost certainly catch the eyes of sports fans, not to mention the juggernaut of advertising that comes along with the NFL machine.
Yahoo, in turn, is calling the global live stream of an NFL game a "historic event."
We love the idea and think it will be received very well by football fans. The league is pretty shrewd to decide to experiment with a live stream with an international game that would have previously failed to deliver strong ratings. We see this as recurring play for the NFL, hopefully just without the Jags involved, though.
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