Yahoo's NFL experiment was a big hit.
The tech giant received 33.6 million video streams of the first, free global live stream NFL game — pitting the Buffalo Bills against the Jacksonville Jaguars from London on Sunday — across all devices on Yahoo and Tumblr, the National Football League reported in a press release statement sent to Tech Times on Monday.
The game, which seen the Jaguars pull off a wild 34-31 victory, tallied 15.2 million unique viewers, a number that can grow once the NFL counts digital data for markets in Buffalo, Jacksonville, London and China.
The game marked the first time fans could experience an NFL game without cable or satellite television, able to stream it live. The NFL also reports that 33 percent of the audience for Sunday's game was international, accounting for over five million viewers outside of the United States.
"It's been a great opportunity to partner with the NFL and deliver a truly exceptional global live streaming experience for our users," Adam Cahan, Yahoo's SVP of Product and Engineering, said in a press release statement. "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."
The NFL is equally excited with how the experiment fared.
"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."
Since the first, free global live stream NFL game was received so well, it could open up the possibility of games being streamed live more often. And the future of sports viewing is upon us. Touchdown!
That being said, the weekend experiment brought its fair share of criticism as well — including that from Re/Code, which wrote it off a low-stakes first worth $20 million, which was the price Yahoo paid to gain rights to the game.
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