Yahoo! and the NFL are basking in the glow of Sunday’s groundbreaking web-only broadcast of Sunday’s matchup between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars in London. According to a press release, the game attracted 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million streams.
While those numbers are likely inflated, the Internet broadcast was noteworthy in that it was free of the usual authentication hurdles typically associated with streaming content and it mostly worked in the end.
“We waited until now because we wanted to make sure the Internet could handle it,” NFL executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “We weren’t going to do this until we felt confident in everyone being able to see the game.”
In order for a worldwide audience to check out an average 30 minutes of Buffalo and Jacksonville, Yahoo! claims it delivered 8.5 petabytes to end users. Consider the average person can buy one terabyte hard drives to fill up with music, photos and high definition video for around $50 a pop. Now consider one petabyte is made up of 1,000 terabytes. So, yes, we’re talking a serious amount of data getting pushed through the pipe.
However, the Yahoo! live-stream had to deal with so many more variables compared to a traditional broadcaster. We’re talking wildly different home broadband and mobile carrier download speeds, operating systems, web browsers and digital media boxes compared to a cable box or over-the-air antenna.
HBO could do an entire season of “Silicon Valley” built around the premise of Pied Piper trying to accomplish what Yahoo! and the NFL did on Sunday.
Using Yahoo!’s app on a 2nd generation Apple TV and AT&T’s gigabit broadband service, my experience wasn’t perfect. The game came on just fine, but the stream couldn’t consistently hold 60 frames-per-second. Don’t get me wrong, WatchESPN is only 30 frames-per-second, so props to Yahoo! for trying and hitting the frame rate benchmark more times than not. However, not everyone is OK with “first world problems” of occasional fuzz and stutter.
@joeovies I'm Chromecasting from the iPad. Same here. Looks great when it holds though
— El Ted O (@tednorris) October 25, 2015
@joeovies for your study: chromecasting from my Mac desktop was a snap, is in clear HD, hasn't paused yet (ESPN usually does a bit)
— Hayes Permar (@DHPIV) October 25, 2015
@joeovies I just have it on in the background. TWC, 60-ish Mbps. Hasn't had an issue.
— Tommy Watson (@Tachibana828) October 25, 2015
@joeovies on Chromecast through laptop. Blurry, freezes, and then skips plays to catch up. About 80% of game is good..rest struggles
— Steve Young (@Ihatelightblue) October 25, 2015
@joeovies Watching on Roku over Comcast. 1080p quality and no lagging issues. Impressed.
— Fritz Kroncke (@FritzKroncke) October 25, 2015
Couple of buffering issues, but it's been good. And I like the options on the telecast. https://t.co/E5wWfpkMMK
— Brenden Whitted (@WBHUAlum) October 25, 2015
@joeovies Watching thru NFL app on Xbox. It's OK but the SD (and blech-D) moments are an annoyance. Only 2-3 buffering instances so far.
— Gary Marbry (@nuggetpalooza) October 25, 2015
And the stream just crapped out and restarted to commercials. Get it together @YahooTV
— Losing Builds Character (@SportsDespair) October 25, 2015
@joeovies Had been solid and clean here.
— James Stewart (@jamespstewart) October 25, 2015
@joeovies streaming through computer and chromecast seems to be working well…so far
— PJ Strahl (@PJStrahl) October 25, 2015
@joeovies Had 0 feed problems the 10ish minutes that I watched. Was actually pretty impressed. Had 0 interest in a garbage game, though.
— Jordan Anders (@ReflectorJordan) October 25, 2015
@joeovies had it going on both iPad via https://t.co/HgGx1Efa59 and yahoo app on roku, roku was a full min behind .com, picture good though
— Bain! (@fnBain) October 25, 2015
@joeovies Working fine on my 15 mbps on my phone. Can't get it going on my Chromecast though.
— mason????☭ (@MasonMorris9) October 25, 2015
@joeovies running thru the app on amazon fire. Running much better than espn does on sling
— The 900 (@drod900) October 25, 2015
As with all matters in the NFL, the league’s endgame with streaming is to extract more money from more sources.
Given the Thursday night football package and three London games are up for grabs in 2016, you know full well the NFL will use the Yahoo! experience to negotiate with tech companies who need content as a product differentiator.
For instance, Google could use football to drive YouTube and Chromecast growth. Perhaps Apple drops a ton of cash on a full Thursday night slate and make it an Apple TV exclusive as a way to sell more boxes. Netflix, now a full-blown network with original programming, might look to the NFL for their next move.
At a time when technology has disrupted the traditional television experience, none of these ideas seems all that far-fetched.