Media
Learning from Yahoo's plan to stream Oct. 24 Bills-Jaguars game
One question with the NFL’s executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp and CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus:
What do you hope to learn from the Oct. 25 Bills-Jaguars game that will be streamed by Yahoo?
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ROLAPP: We’re most interested in finding out what the opportunities are and what’s different when you distribute a game on the Internet exclusively over IP. With the television model, you geographically pick a partner. Yahoo is a partner that is global in scale. We’re interested to see how that changes things.
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Sean McManus and Brian Rolapp speak at last week’s CBS Media Day event
in New York.
Photo by: CBS SPORTS
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We’re interested to see when you give it to a company that has different businesses than traditional media businesses, how they promote, how they distribute, how they monetize the game.
Yahoo is making sure that the engineering and the technical distribution of the game will be on par with television. That’s important for us to see. Is the Internet ready for that? We think it is, but we’ll find out.
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McMANUS: Any time something has to do with a digital property, it gets an inordinate amount of attention in the media. The NFL is approaching it like we are — as a learning experience to gauge the viewership and fan reaction. I don’t think any of us really know what that is. It’s going to be a worthy experiment.
Viewership levels will be the first piece of information that we will look at. They will be analyzed and overanalyzed to see what kind of impact it has in the marketplace, from an ad revenue standpoint and a viewership standpoint.
