When the Jacksonville Jaguars and Buffalo Bills faced off in London on Sunday, perhaps "only their loyal fans" cared "about the score," according to Smith & Womack of BLOOMBERG. The rest watched to see if Yahoo! Inc. made "a compelling case that football can be just as good online as it is on TV." The company paid about $17M for the rights to stream the game around the world from London at 9:30am EST, "according to a person familiar with the terms." By comparison, CBS paid about $37.5M per game "in its one-year deal to broadcast the National Football League on Thursday nights." Yahoo played the game "big across its various Web properties with video that automatically starts" when visitors landed on one of its sites, according to two people who requested not to be named because the plans are private. Yahoo "has something to prove," namely that it can successfully stream the nation’s most popular sport to a global audience "without the delays and disruptions that have come to characterize so much of live online viewing." Last June, for instance, ESPN’s online stream of a World Cup match crashed, "a problem the network attributed to excessive traffic." In April, an outage prevented subscribers to Dish Network Corp.’s Sling TV, "which offers nearly two-dozen channels via the Web" for $20 a month, from watching college basketball’s Final Four. Yahoo placed "a bet squarely on the future." Media companies like Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., CBS Corp., Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal and the Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN have "locked up the rights to broadcast most NFL games at least through the end of the decade." But when those contracts expire, the NFL is "likely to court partners who can deliver a football game to tablets and mobile phones along with TVs." BTIG Research Analyst Rich Greenfield said, “This is an early testing ground to understand the Internet’s capability to deliver something like this.” Frost & Sullivan Analyst Dan Rayburn said that while Yahoo or Google "have plenty of cash to experiment, they can't rely on the same source of revenue as the broadcasters to sustain an online sports business." Rayburn added that they would "likely try to make their money back from advertising or charging fans a few bucks to watch the game, and it would probably be impossible for them to recoup their costs that way." Nonetheless, Yahoo was not the "only company interested in streaming the game." Twitter, Google and Amazon were among those "vying for the game, according to another person familiar with the matter" (BLOOMBERG, 10/23). SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL's John Ourand noted "a non-marquee game in an odd time slot ... almost certainly will not command the size of audience the NFL is used to seeing on Sunday afternoon." However, it is a "step toward having ... tech companies bid for the NFL's media packages in 2021-22, when the league's current deals expire" (SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL, 10/19). In N.Y., Flint & MacMillan wrote the NFL "has been very aggressive in seeking new revenue streams and has flirted with Silicon Valley in the past about possible partnerships." NFL Exec VP/Media and NFL Network CEO Brian Rolapp said, "There are a lot of people who want to put this into the box of an experiment or a stunt and it is not. We wouldn’t put a game out there if we didn’t think this was real distribution.” Rolapp added that it is "possible the NFL could offer a package of games for streaming video players as early as next season" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 10/22).
K-LEAGUE BROADCAST: SOCCEREX reported Vietnam Cable TV (VTVcab) "picked up a package of broadcasting rights to the K-League," the top-tier club football competition in South Korea, for the next two seasons. The deal will see the Vietnamese pay-TV operator "air six live games per week from the K-League in Vietnam" throughout the '16 and '17 seasons. VTVcab "already has the broadcast rights" in Vietnam to the likes of the EPL, La Liga and the Bundesliga (SOCCEREX, 10/23).
