The Web portal attracted 15.2 million unique viewers in a game Sunday between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars at Wembley Stadium in London, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said in a statement Monday.
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Here’s the bottom line: Yahoo’s NFL live stream seems like it was a worthwhile experiment for both companies involved, but it’s not going to incite a live-streaming football revolution just yet. It averages 13.5 million for Monday Night Football.
Yahoo did not report the number of simultaneous live streams – the metric that would most closely approximate traditional TV viewership – but CNN Money estimated that that it was likely 2 million simultaneous streams. Expect the league to give Yahoo and its competitors more chances to stream games in the future, but as the bidding process for this one shows, expect them not to come cheap.
Most of Manuel’s games were played in the US, but he was also a part of the Bills’ Toronto Series. Yahoo touted its performance, saying that it provided an average rebuffering ratio of almost 1 percent, “while delivering over 8.5 petabytes” to viewers.
Hans Schroeder, Yahoo’s Senior Vice President of Business & Sales, Media Strategy for the National Football League, said Yahoo was successful in roping in such a large number because it distributed the video digitally rather than telecasting to a limited TV audience in the U.S.
It is speculated that Yahoo paid at least $20 million for the rights to stream the game, in return for exclusive ad rights.
If we assume that a few people did watch most of the game, there were a lot of people who watched a lot less 30.3 minutes.
The global audience was spread across 185 countries, Yahoo said, adding that the streaming reached high-definition levels with a top speed of over 7.64 megabits per second.
That will incorporate the TV audience from two CBS affiliates that aired the game in Buffalo (WIVB) and Jacksonville (WJAX); the television audience in the United Kingdom via Sky and BBC pacts; and digital viewing in China.
“Not much of a sports fan, but this @Yahoo stream of the #NFL game is lovely on mobile”.
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The Jaguars beat the Bills 34-31 in the game, which lasted 3 hours and 15 minutes.
