Yahoo logged 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million streams for Sunday’s Bills-Jaguars game, a number that NFL execs believe will make it the most streamed sporting event in U.S. history. However, by television standards, the numbers do not seem as gaudy. The league says more than 460 million total minutes of video were consumed worldwide, around 320 million of which occurred in the U.S. That equates to an average minute audience in the U.S. of 1.64 million, not including the over-the-air TV numbers in Buffalo and Jacksonville. The average minute audience of 1.64 million marks an all-time low viewership figure for a national NFL game. Internationally, the average minute audience was at 2.36 million viewers. Still, NFL execs said they were encouraged by the online numbers. The 33.6 million streams also are well above the 3.5 million streams that Yahoo promised advertisers it would deliver. The league expects viewer numbers to increase when they add in over-the-air TV numbers in Buffalo, Jacksonville and London, plus digital numbers from China. The number of streams peaked in the 4th quarter, as the Jaguars won a close game. NFL Senior VP/Media Strategy, Business Development & Sales Hans Schroeder said an individual stream was counted if viewers stayed and watched for more than three seconds. In order to increase the number of streams, the game was on autoplay to anyone who visiting the Yahoo.com homepage. “A lot of people stayed,” Schroeder said. “It felt like television, which is exactly what we were looking for.” As much as 33% of the audience (more than 5 million viewers) came from 180 international markets. While acknowledging that some people experienced glitches “on the edges,” Schroeder was enthused about how well the game performed online. “It was really an overwhelming experience from our perspective -- a great event,” Schroeder said. “This showed us that digital is ready for the NFL.” Schroeder said the NFL would decide “over the next couple of months” if it will make another game available on digital next season. Schroeder said he knew early-on -- during the Yahoo pregame show -- that the game was going to generate a lot of interest, given the number of concurrent users watching a fantasy football show from 8:00-9:00am ET and the pregame show from 9:00-9:30am (John Ourand, Staff Writer).
A PLEASED LEAGUE: THE MMQB's Peter King reports the NFL is "likely to parcel out more than one game to an internet company" in '16. NFL Exec VP/Media and NFL Network CEO Brian Rolapp: "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. ... 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." Rolapp and some NFL employees "watched from a conference room on Park Avenue." Rolapp: "We had it up on laptops, tablets, Surfaces, iPhones, Roku, Xbox, everything we could think of, and the stream held up well on all of them." He notes the NFL "wanted to know if the picture quality would be good when millions of people tried to access the game at the same time" and to see if there was an "appetite for the game in some of the places where the NFL is underserved." Additionally, the NFL wanted to see if everything would go "smoothly enough so that the project might expand and more games would be exclusively streamed ... beginning next year." It is "likely that there could be a Sunday game plus at least one Thursday game headed for the internet in 2016." Rolapp: "We’ve always thought of the Thursday package as a way to help us prepare for the future, in part" (MMQB.SI.com, 10/26).
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: USA TODAY's Mike Snider reports some viewers of the game complained on Twitter "about frozen screens and no video." The live feed prior to kickoff "included some annoying beeps," but those "were gone by the time CBS ... began calling the early-morning action." Snider: "This viewer's game video was smooth and detailed on the computer, tablet and smartphone. However, the feed on a big-screen TV via the NFL app on Xbox Live, while it was watchable and never froze or went black, was not as smooth and had a perceptible stutter" (USA TODAY, 10/26). SI.com's Richard Deitsch noted he watched the game on "both my iPhone and a MAC laptop" and the iPhone picture quality "was beautiful; it felt like a video game at times." Deitsch: "The laptop quality was also high, though I often had some buffering, pixilation and lagging issues (the stream was well behind Twitter), especially in the first half" (SI.com, 10/25). THE MMQB's King writes, "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" (MMQB.SI.com, 10/26). But in Albany, Pete Dougherty writes NFL online streaming "isn't ready for mass consumption" if yesterday was any indication. He writes of the video, "Mine was jittery, almost to the point of being unwatchable. The frame would freeze for an instant every second. The audio was ahead of the video. So who gets the blame? Yahoo? My computer? My internet connection? Doesn't matter. I'm not looking for culprits, I'm looking for a clean, smooth feed of the game, and I wasn't getting it" (Albany TIMES UNION, 10/26).
