14 DAY TRIAL // The NFL (National Football League) announced last season it intends to offer one of its games online for free. Today, together with Yahoo in a joint press release, more details about this particular event were provided.
The game targeted for NFL's first ever live online broadcast is one of its London games, the meeting between Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars on October 25, supposed to be played 9:30 AM EDT / 16:30 GMT.
According to Re/code, Yahoo coughed up $20 / €17.75 million for the rights to this game, which it will broadcast for free.
Sports Illustrated's Peter King also disclosed that two other companies were also trying to win the bid, but the NFL refused them because they also intended to charge users a fee to see it.
The NFL is one of the world's most successful sports leagues, with a TV rights deal that's worth $27 / €23.95 billion that extends through 2022.
The NFL is just testing the water
NFL games can be watched online via the NFL website and its NFL Game Pass service, but these aren't original broadcasts, just basic TV feeds.
Offering Yahoo the chance to broadcast one of its games online is the league experimenting with a possible new revenue stream, a domain where the NFL was always at the forefront, way ahead of other leagues like the NBA, NHL, or FIFA.
Now what's left is for the two teams to provide a good show, for which there are pretty low chances, since none of them have made the playoffs for 15 years (Bills) and 7 years (Jaguars) respectively.
But if there's something we can all expect from the NFL is that there's no other sport with a greater turnover from season to season, and anything can happen on any given Sunday.
The NFL will change football and TV forever by letting Yahoo stream a game online http://t.co/1V9XjOOo2u
— Althea Johnson (@DCSmallBz) June 3, 2015