Verdict on Yahoo NFL game: Promising

Over the past decade, a number of major sporting events have migrated from broadcast to cable, including MLB’s League Championship Series, the college football title game and Wimbledon.

Now there’s another frontier poised to start wooing away those sporting rights: digital.

And we got the first taste of it over the weekend, when Yahoo aired the first-ever online-only NFL game.

The Jacksonville Jaguars-Buffalo Bills contest drew okay numbers—it averaged 2.36 million total viewers per minute and had 15 million people sample at least a few minutes of the contest.

That is a small sliver of the average NFL game on TV, which averages upwards of 20 million to 25 million viewers, but it’s a big audience for online, where people have more choices for viewing and more sites competing for their attention.

Consider that last winter’s Super Bowl averaged 800,000 viewers per minute. That makes the Yahoo audience more impressive.

But the real significance of the game isn’t in the actual numbers. It’s in the promise of digital for live sporting events, which has gone largely untapped despite the plethora of entertainment options that have popped up online in recent years, on sites from Netflix to Crackle.

There are logistical considerations, of course.

It’s significantly more difficult to broadcast a high-quality feed of a live event than it is to load a pre-recorded video such as “House of Cards” onto a site.

The downside of digital could be seen on Sunday, when the game encountered glitches early on, though the second half went more smoothly.

While online video has come a long way in the past decade, it’s far from perfect, and that’s one of the major factors in the lack of digital sporting events.

It’s simply not a reliable way to broadcast yet—imagine the outcry if a major event such as the NBA playoffs were online only and buffering issues or other digital problems knocked out that feed.

There are also other logistical considerations.

The rights contracts for most major sports, including NFL and NBA, were drawn up at a time when digital video was just beginning to become a major thing.

They account for very basic digital rights, but they’re arguably behind the times. The NFL, for instance, has been available on mobile devices only through Verizon for years, in a billion-dollar deal that expires in 2017.

There’s also the question of money, of course. Yahoo paid a reported $17 million for Sunday’s game, or about half what CBS is paying for each game this season.

For now, TV networks have the edge on price. They are willing to pay more in part because they can sell advertising for more. Yahoo’s audience was more limited, and its game had fewer commercial breaks than the typical NFL game.

Sports have a big advantage over other TV content: They’re viewed live and are seen as DVR-proof, which means they are highly desirable for advertisers, at a time when networks’ ratings are declining.

In the short term, networks will be willing to pay more to keep the big sports properties on television, but expect more and more experiments such as the Yahoo NFL game as the leagues test the digital waters.

In the very long term, their future will no doubt be online.

Tags: nfl game yahoo, sports rights, sports tv, yahoo, yahoo nfl game