Last season, the NFL experimented with live streaming for the first time by selling the broadcasting rights for the International Series Buffalo Bills vs. Jacksonville Jaguars game in London to Yahoo. The NFL held the stream up as a success, counting 15.2 million unique viewers during the course of the game. But with three International Series games to now be played in London this upcoming season, the NFL opted to not sell any of the broadcasting rights to a digital media company.
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The NFL told Reuters that they are instead focusing on their recent digital streaming deal with Twitter, which included 10 Thursday Night Football games. Twitter did have the option to stream any of the three London games as part of the deal, but decided against showing them.
This announcement comes as no big surprise, as the NFL would not want to stray from their recent partnership with Twitter that sees the social media platform shelling out $1 million per game. So, selling the digital broadcasting rights of the three London games to another company is out of the question.
Additionally, last season’s stream of the London game was truly an experiment, despite the NFL saying otherwise. They did not want to sell the broadcasting rights of a competitive, highly viewed matchup to a digital media company, so they chose the Bills vs. Jaguars. The NFL was merely looking to gauge their international audience and the overall interest there is within the realm of live streaming.
Now that they recognized the potential, they moved forward with the Twitter deal—the next step in reaching the audience of millennial “cord-cutters.” There is essentially no need for the three London games to be streamed in the eyes of the NFL, as the international audience that tuned in last October will be able to see ten Thursday Night Football games via Twitter.
While the NFL does want to expand its reach internationally, and digitally showcasing the three International Series games would surely add more excitement around each matchup, it just doesn’t make sense at the moment to live stream these games.