15.6 million viewers and 33.6 million total live streams of the Yahoo NFL game

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Also for the first time since the NFL has been televising its product, a game was streamed live, free and exclusively on the internet. And though Buffalo-Jacksonville in London wasn’t a marquee game, it accomplished just what the NFL and Yahoo, the provider, had hoped. Yahoo announced that it had 15.6 million unique viewers and 33.6 million total live streams of the game; roughly 33% of that viewership came from outside the U.S.

“We’re a lot closer to the internet being a real, legitimate distribution platform for NFL games than we were one or two years ago,” NFL executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp told me late Sunday night. And there’s little doubt that, though the league treats its 256 regular-season games like home-TV gold, it’s likely to parcel out more than one game to an internet company in 2016.

That will make fans around the world happy. “The streaming quality was fantastic,” said Marcelo Fujimoto, a Cleveland-raised Browns fan who watched in São Paulo, Brazil. “It was like watching a game on TV.”

Vietnam checked in with praise. “It was better than I expected,” said Tyrone Carriaga, another football fan who watched in Ho Chi Minh City. “No freeze screen at all.”

“First,” said Brian Rolapp, “we wouldn’t call it an experiment. We waited until now because we wanted to make sure the internet could handle it; we weren’t going to do this until we felt confident in everyone being able to see the game. The quality of the production and the quality of the stream both had to be good. And we think it was, from everything we’ve heard.”
My experiment with Bills-Jags on Yahoo, I suppose, was not unlike others in the United States with things to do on Sunday morning. In my Manhattan East Side apartment, I tried two devices, a laptop and a smart phone, just before the game kicked off. Got into Yahoo.com immediately on both, and painlessly got the game up in time to see Kevin Harlan and Rich Gannon give me a quick preview. The smart phone was two seconds ahead of the laptop in streaming the game. I kept both on until I had to leave at 10:45 to make the trek to NBC for our Sunday studio show. I kept the phone on, and it mostly held the stream well, though there were three or four gaps of 10 seconds or so when the screen froze. But mostly good. And then, at NBC, with a strong signal obviously, the picture was fine through the end of the game.

Rolapp and some NFL employees watched from a conference room on Park Avenue. “We had it up on laptops, tablets, Surfaces, iPhones, Roku, Xbox, everything we could think of,” he said, “and the stream held up well on all of them.”
So the NFL wanted to see three things when it decided to take one of its three Sunday morning games from London and show it free on the internet only, rather than on a television network or its domestic and international subscription services. One: The league wanted to know if the picture quality would be good when millions of people tried to access the game at the same time, not just in America but around the world, given that internet infrastructure varies widely. Two: The league wanted to see if there was an appetite for the game in some of the places where the NFL is underserved. Russia and China, for instance, and a Sunday morning game in Eastern Time would be a Sunday evening prime-time game in large swaths of Asia. Three: Would it all go smoothly enough so that the project might expand and more games would be exclusively streamed to the net beginning next year?

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Peter KingVerified account
?@SI_PeterKing
More Yahoo numbers: 15.2 million unique viewers (a little less than average TNF (17.6M) and more than average for MNF (13.5M)

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