Yahoo Scores Touchdown With NFL's London Live Stream

Yahoo! Inc. YHOO offered a live stream of Sunday's NFL match featuring the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Buffalo Bills.
Yahoo's streaming offering attracted 15.2 million unique viewers, 33 percent of which were international users.
Yahoo partnered with more than 30 top brands for the stream.

The Jacksonville Jaguars defeated the Buffalo Bills in a special NFL match that occurred at London's Wembley Stadium. According to

Adam Cahan, Yahoo's SVP Product and Engineering, the "real winner" was Yahoo as the company was granted exclusive rights to live stream the match for free across both Yahoo and Tumblr. Yahoo's executive commented in a blog post that that this was a historic first for the NFL, as fans were offered the first free, global live stream of a regular season game without needing to subscribe to a cable package, authentication or even having a TV. Cahan continued that Yahoo registered 33.6 million streams of the game and over 15.2 million unique viewers. 33 percent of the streams came from international fans, spanning across 185 countries. As a whole, football fans streamed over 460 million total minutes of the game across all devices. "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," NFL senior vice president Hans Schroeder said in a statement. Yahoo also pointed out that it collaborated with more than 30 top brands to offer its live streaming event. ESPN

commented

on the streaming broadcast and said that it "appeared to go pretty smoothly" as the quality of the picture was "pretty clear for the most part" and went off "without a hitch." Naturally, this is "good news" for the NFL as a whole who can now expand its brand and teams across non-US markets. ESPN also pointed out that the NFL's agreement with CBS for Thursday night games is only a one-year deal and the organization could explore different ways of distributing the games. There was no mention if NFL could permanently partner with Yahoo, although this may be a possibility following the successful streaming.

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