NFL’s First Live-Streamed Game on Yahoo Attracted 15M Viewers | Hacker News Reader

NFL’s First Live-Streamed Game on Yahoo Attracted 15M Viewers

techcrunch.com

40 pointsphamilton52 comments

As a reminder to non-football fans, this was for a game between two teams few people were very interested in, broadcast at a time when half of America was still asleep.

I caught the game while still laying in bed, mostly out of curiosity for what the stream was like. And it did not disappoint. Already it was a better watching experience than any other medium available. That doesn't even say anything about new possibilities going forward, like offering different commentary tracks, overlays, camera angles, etc.

Yahoo, not only was it good, I would be willing to pay decent money for more services like this. Make it happen!

> That doesn't even say anything about new possibilities going forward, like offering different commentary tracks

This is one place where the MLB has a bit of an advantage over the NFL since most MLB games are broadcast for both the home and away audiences so you have 2 commentary tracks available on MLB.tv (in addition to the various radio audio).

The NFL has announcer coverage for both markets - you notice this on NFL rewind sometimes. When you add in radio coverage, each game typically has 4-6 commentary tracks.

Radio coverage can be a lot better than what ends up on TV. We used to mute the TV and have a radio going which worked great, though the commercials could end up somewhat surreal.

Huge problem with their service is time syncing between various 'tracks'. Radio streams spoil Gameday and vice-versa.

I also find $25/mo to be just a little too high to indulge in video streaming.

Yahoo strategy is extremely interesting.

I don't watch football, but I saw their add with Katie Couric. They seem very intent on piercing into a new business, leveraging their name and demographics.

And now you say the execution was great too, that got me interested in what they may do. We'll see how well it works!

Spot on. I let out a loud groan when I saw this matchup was going to be live streamed, knowing the numbers would be massively higher if it was a decent matchup at a normal time. Still, well done to Yahoo working with what they got from the league.

To be fair, they may have wanted a lower profile game to make sure the service didn't go down under the weight.

If anyone remembers what twitch.tv was like a few years ago it used to stutter during most regular LCS broadcasts.

Now they handle the finals without any problem. (I heard they had a major re-architecture a couple of years ago, and certainly there did seem to be a sudden major improvement.)

Going back further, this experiment: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/8286... to stream an England qualifier live was a bit of a disaster (although I'm finding it hard to dig up any reviews from the time), although it had both a high price point (£5 pre-ordered, rising to £12 on the day!) and back then the technology really wasn't ready for good quality live streaming.

Ironically, NBC is already there. They stream their game a week, and the have individual player cameras and "tactical" cameras that offer a top-down view of the field. Of course, accessing any of this requires a cable TV login, so it's of limited use.

Other sports streaming services allow you to swap between home and away broadcasts (where there are two broadcasts) or fill in the radio broadcast track in place of the TV commentary trayck.

The kicker here was the volume of traffic. 2.3 million average simultaneous streams. The Super bowl last year had half that.

Key points:

1. The 15M number is massively inflated for unique viewers, as the game was auto-playing on the Yahoo! and tumblr homepages. More detailed breakdown of the numbers here: http://deadspin.com/not-nearly-as-many-people-watched-bills-...

2. The NFL will not be rolling out a la carte streaming packages any time soon, as they have a preference to selling exclusive rights at a premium, e.g. - DirecTV has exclusive rights to broadcast all games, and stream all games digitally through 2022 (http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11624442/nfl-extends-sunda...) - Verizon has exclusive rights to broadcast all games on smartphones through 2022 (https://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2015/09/live-st...)

3. For comparison, both MLB and NBA offer streaming plans for all of their games, for reasonable prices ($130 for MLB, $200 for NBA). These plans are only limited in not showing local market games. They also have great app support (iOS, Android, Roku, "Smart" TVs, etc)

I find it amazing they offer a brilliant online streaming service but you have to be abroad (Gamepass - I'm UK based).

I pay something like 20GBP a month during football season and get every game live in HD via chromecast, iOS, Web or Android plus redzone. They evidently have the chops and infrastructure to do it but its all a question of running the oligolpoly with the broadcasting services in the US.

The article has been updated at the very bottom. It seems to support your view that 15M greatly overstates the audience:

Update: ESPN is now reporting that the Yahoo stream saw an average minute audience of 2.36 million, and 1.64 million in the U.S. This is lower than the typical Monday Night Football game as well. For instance, last week’s Giants-Eagles MNF audience attracted 13.9 million viewers, said ESPN. The 15.2 million figure instead refers to the total number of uniques who watched some or all of the game’s stream.

the NBA league pass service is also limited because you can't watch nationally televised games ( any games on ESPN, NBAtv, TNT, NBC, ABC, etc etc )

For MLB, IIRC the only exception is for Sunday night games on ESPN. All other national games are non-exclusive: while ESPN/TBS/Fox are broadcasting it nationally, the local stations are broadcasting as well, which can be streamed through the mlb.tv package. Sunday nights are the only games that are national-only, and so can't be streamed through mlb.tv.

Once the playoffs start though, all games are national only, and there are different rules, making the playoff games more difficult to stream.

The video was auto-played on Yahoo's homepage as well as the homepage of NFL.com, which is inflating these numbers quite a bit.

That said, the stream was impressively high quality. Much better than DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket streaming package that I pay $50/month for. I didn't have any buffering issues and the quality only dropped below HD a handful of times throughout the broadcast.

I'd love to see a better online streaming option for live sports, but it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. The networks and ESPN simply need the NFL too much to give up control or be outbid anytime in the near future.

It also autoplayed on the dashboard of the Tumblr mobile app.

The stream quality was beyond my expectations, it was crisp and clear. This is a service I would happily pay for since DirectTV's Sunday Ticket streams are often lag/time out for me on other devices.

The NFL has considerable experience streaming and they are quite good at it: The NFL has been streaming games for a while now, via Game Pass (available on AppleTV, e.g.).

What's different here is that someone else licensed the rights to stream the game, i.e., Yahoo.

I cancelled cable years ago and would dearly love for the NFL to sell me what I want, but they won't, at least not yet: Game Pass allows the customer to stream the regular Sunday afternoon games, but not the evening games (Thursday, Sunday, and Monday) and not playoffs. I cancelled Game Pass when I realized that (yup, failed to read the fine print).

(What about those Sunday games? Well, I have an OTA antenna, and get a full Sunday afternoon's worth of NFL for free, even if I don't get to choose the games - which I could do with Game Pass. I also get many of the playoff games, at least for now, since they tend to be carried by the major networks, and not the cable-only sports channels. (I'm in Canada.))

NFL has a phenomenal option that is only available to international users. So what do I do? 1. Use a VPN to connect to Netherlands. 2. Get international gamepass plan for the year. 3. Then use the gamepass app on my tablet. (needs to be sideloaded as it is region locked) 4. Once you start just one game, then disconnect VPN. You will now use your local internet to stream your games.

I can chromecast ANY NFL game at ANY time. I typically wait an hour or so after the game ends BECAUSE the NFL strips out the commercials then. :) You can also watch it in condensed mode which only shows every play. A game is 35 minutes or so.

With this, I get to watch the games in great HD on my big TV and commercial free.

All I want is to be able to pick my team, pay like $15/mo and be able to watch my team play. I don't care about any other team at all, and my team isn't local by any means so I can't use an antenna. AFAIK, I don't have a legal option to watch my team play unless I grab an overpriced cable/satellite plan that I don't want. GamePass isn't for the US (if I remember correctly), and even if it were, the pricing is terrible and has the issues you mentioned.

My only option is shady SD streams. It's better than nothing, but I'm willing to throw money at the problem if they'll let me.

>My only option is shady SD streams. It's better than nothing, but I'm willing to throw money at the problem if they'll let me.

>I don't have a legal option to watch my team play unless I grab an overpriced cable/satellite plan that I don't want.

Sounds like you do have another option! (DirecTV pays the NFL 1.5 billion dollars a year to be able to offer you that overpriced plan.)

A realistic option, then? I've no use for anything else that DirecTV has to offer. I've got Netflix and Hulu, so I'm set on TV shows and movies. Unless you think paying that much money just to watch football is a realistic option?

You'd be surprised at how the cost works out. Bundles exist so expensive content can be subsidized by cheaper content. ESPN costs the provider much more than most channels. In other words, getting ESPN a la carte is going to run you $20-30/month. The other channels in the bundle make it so non sports fans can subsidize your subscription.

Gamepass doesn't stream at 60fps though, has more ads.

p.s. Sign up for Gamepass using VPN with an endpoint in another coutry (you can arbitrage the pricing too, some times the cost in another country is $50-80 cheaper). Then all you need to do is login under your VPN, start streaming, and then turn off the VPN once the stream has started. You can watch all the games, including playoffs. No blackouts.

The NFL also streams prime-time and local games to smartphones on Verizon via their app. That's the only way I can see Monday Night Football since I don't get ESPN. It works well, for me anyway.

Serious questions:

If sports viewing goes online (like MotoGP) wouldn't the organization lose a considerable amount of money and effectively ruin their relationships with tv networks that pay serious money for rights coverage? I'm of the mindset MotoGP is doing ok because they never had insane tv rights viewership or distribution. Another example, the NHL has their online viewing program but it blocks out regional games or games with specific rights attributions.

And then, theoretically, let's say these organizations do survive by moving all (or the vast majority of) their viewers onto their own live platform - would that be considered a monopoly of some sorts by forcing out all the other players?

That being said, I'm totally ok with all of this because the cable box as we know it is dying fast and sports are the only thing keeping it alive.

For that, look at the WWE Network.

They maintain production and distribution rights on their most valuable content, pay-per-view events that go for something like $60-80USD on cable. They compete with themselves by offering a yearly lock-in for what's basically the price of one of these events. It's not complete, since they don't have full distribution rights on their weekly show, which appears on their streaming service after a one-to-two week delay.

If the service takes off, that'll be a big nail in the coffin of TV sports. That said, it's had middling success to date (I haven't paid close attention, as I'm not a wrestling fan in the least).

Other sports contract out their production and distribution rights to TV networks, so trying to go to a streaming model will be very difficult by comparison. They'll be building out what is basically a full on-air platform at the same time they're building out a streaming service that can support the added demand of local viewers while simultaneously breaking off relations with their current broadcasters. And to make things even more complicated, some of those broadcasters own the teams they carry (in hockey alone, the NY Rangers and Cablevision TV are both owned by Jim Dolan, while the Toronto Maple Leafs are owned by a conglomeration of Bell and Rogers telecoms). With these complications, the rights may be the bigger block than the technology.

Apparently that 15M number may be a bit inaccurate: http://deadspin.com/not-nearly-as-many-people-watched-bills-...

I watched my first football game since getting rid of cable thanks to this. The stream was much higher quality than I expected, froze two or three times for less than 5 seconds, pretty awesome for a first effort if you ask me. I have a theory that the TV networks know sports is the only thing holding a lot of people back from cutting the cable, and their next TV deal will be HUGE, but it won't stop people from cutting the cable, but will instead lead to fewer people being interested in professional sports, and that both the TV networks and the sports leagues will lose in the long run with this monster deal.

You can buy an antenna from Amazon for 20$ and watch all the local channels and the games. Just fyi...

I have never had cable but watch almost every Sunday night game on NBC.

An interesting stat from another article[0]:

"CNN's recent debates peaked with almost 1 million simultaneous live streams. Last season's Super Bowl peaked with 1.3 million."

Apparently this game had 2.3 million simultaneous streams.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/26/media/nfl-yahoo-live-stream-...

I've been a subscriber to Dorna's MotoGP VideoPass[1] for a couple of years and it is incredible (yes it's got some issues but overall it's fantastic). Stream practice session, qualifying, races, press conferences live or access later at your conveniencef (from a No-Spoiler page none the less!). All completely advertisement free. You can also access a full archive of historical races year round! It's amazing and a model that should be emulated by other sports organizations.

I don't currently follow NFL but mostly because I don't have cable or any way to selectively choose when I watch a game. I would happily pay for NFL access the same way I do for MotoGP.

[1] https://secure.motogp.com/en/subscribe

Yahoo had a nice stream, but actually it was not even the best stream I found yesterday. Interestingly Yahoo had apparently some problem with their CDN, at least when I switched on a US VPN, the stream improved considerably.

Yeah they kinda skewed their numbers by showing two not so good teams at an hour where most west coast Americans were asleep.

NBC Sports used to (still do?) have an Internet feed for their Sunday Night Football games and TNT did it for some NBA games.

I feel it was way better for me since I could put it in the background or on my other computer and kind of watch it in the background. When you're kinda just watching sports by yourself its kinda boring waiting for the action so being able to control your experience from your computer (volume up, volume down, switch to other game) rather than having to fetch the remote is nice.

The NFL's streaming offerings are why I pirate game streams and don't have a lick of remorse about it. The only option I have to legally stream games is to not only pay for the gamepass package, but also to have satellite TV installed.

I'd be happy to pay a few hundred bucks a year for HD streaming of games, but it's just not an option. The best I can get is streams of games after they've finished, which is pretty much worthless to me.

People keep saying the quality was great. It was pretty good - for a live stream. It still sucked compared to cable or satellite HDTV. NFL games are really the only reason I get DirectTV, and a blurry, pixelated stream isn't going to change that, even if it is slightly less compressed than other streams. (It didn't buffer much at all, I'll give it that.)

Or was my internet provider (Comcast) messing with it?

I strongly believe that pay-per-view sports streams are a thing that should exist. I have subscribed to FuboTV, which is a bundle of soccer-oriented channels, for the (shockingly low) price of $7/mo. I'd pay a good $10 per game I am interested in, I think.

I agree :) I'd go as far as saying every single tv show should be available for pay per view streaming live. That's the world I wanna believe in.

Btw, UFC does it already (and is all on their site), the problem is the old school sports.

I saw at least a handful of commercials for this game on TV and not one of them mentioned it was possible to live-stream. With such a marketing fumble (pun intended), the numbers seem rather irrelevant.

Were you "in-market" for this game? It may have been intentional to not cannibalize TV viewership.

No, not at all.

That might be the death-knell for cable TV.

Not if you witnessed the mediocre quality. I've had no problem with streaming services but, so yahoo must have had issues with the 15m.

What were you watching on? I was just using my basic wifi and the streaming was unsurpassed.

To be fair, football is already the most cable-cutter friendly sport there is. I can watch every game except for MNF using just my antenna.

More cable-cutter friendly than Major League Baseball? On MLB.tv you can pick the home/away feed for almost any game at almost any time, plus view replays and highlights of any game going back to basically the first televised baseball game. And you can watch it on basically any device.

The only downside is the blackouts for home markets.

Every major North American league has a similar service (except the NFL), but the local blackouts make it a non-starter for the vast majority of the viewing audience.

Football is more cable-cutter friendly because local games are almost always put OTA, so it's a matter of setting up an antenna if you don't want to pony up for cable.

There are services that try to do an end-run around local blackouts, but that doesn't really apply here (since the goal is to have a 100% legal, approved means of watching the games live online).

I forgot about baseball because I really, really don't like baseball.

Props though to MLB, I guess.

And if your local team is playing on MNF, it is shown on a channel available through antenna.

actually with your antenna you are only getting 5-6 of the 15-16 games per week

Closer to 7 or 8. Which is about half of all games in a week, and I'm generally happy with the selection.

How much does that selection improve with basic cable but not a specialty package like Sunday Ticket?

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