SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) and the National Football League (NFL) announced today that the first free, global live stream of a regular season NFL game reached over 33.6 million total views across all devices on Yahoo and Tumblr. On Sunday, October 25, the Buffalo Bills faced off against the Jacksonville Jaguars, live from London’s Wembley Stadium. A truly historic event, this was the first time users could access the NFL’s premium content globally, without cable, authentication or TV, and over 15.2 million unique viewers tuned in.
Football fans streamed over 460 million total minutes of the game, with 33% of streams coming in internationally, across 185 countries worldwide. More than 30 top brands partnered with Yahoo to kick off this new era of sports programming, making this a sold out event.
“It’s been a great opportunity to partner with the NFL and deliver a truly exceptional global live streaming experience for our users,” said Adam Cahan, Yahoo’s SVP of Product and Engineering. “We’re seeing a dramatic shift in the industry as audiences’ primary video watching moves away from TV. We were thrilled to join the NFL in setting a new standard for sports programming for our users and advertisers.”
“We’re thrilled with the results of our initial step distributing an NFL game to a worldwide audience and with the work of our partner, Yahoo,” said Hans Schroeder, Senior Vice President, Media Strategy, Business Development & Sales for the NFL. “We are incredibly excited by the fact that we took a game that would have been viewed by a relatively limited television audience in the United States and by distributing it digitally were able to attract a global audience of over 15 million viewers.”
Across the 33.6 million streams and 15.2 million unique viewers, Yahoo brought fans a leading technical experience, performing with an average rebuffering ratio of nearly 1%, while delivering over 8.5 petabytes to end users. The stream reached HD levels, with max bitrates over 6.74 Megabits (Mbps) per second and 60 frames per second (fps).
The Bills/Jaguars game lasted three hours and 15 minutes, kicking off at 1:35 GMT and ending at 4:50 GMT. Jacksonville defeated Buffalo 34-31.
ABOUT YAHOO
Yahoo is a guide focused on informing, connecting, and entertaining our users. By creating highly personalized experiences for our users, we keep people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the world. In turn, we create value for advertisers by connecting them with the audiences that build their businesses. Yahoo is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and has offices located throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific (APAC) and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions. For more information, visit the pressroom (pressroom.yahoo.net) or the Company’s blog (yahoo.tumblr.com).
