This is pretty amazing considering the teams involved. This game wasn’t Brady vs. Manning.
If you stream it, they will come.
Yahoo and the NFL announced on Monday that Sunday’s exclusive live stream of the Bills-Jaguars game from London attracted a huge global audience: 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million total views.
Those viewers streamed over 460 million total minutes of the game with over 33 percent of the streams being used by international users across 185 worldwide. It was the first time that international viewers were able to access a NFL game without cable or satellite.
In comparison, 1.8 million unique users tuned into the WatchESPN app for the 2014 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil, though that game was also broadcast over the air.
Sunday’s audience was almost twice the size of the average audience (7.9 million) that TBS attracted for last week’s NLCS between the Chicago Cubs and New York Mets.
Peter King reports at MMQB that fans can expect to see more NFL games air on the Net:
“We’re a lot closer to the internet being a real, legitimate distribution platform for NFL games than we were one or two years ago,” NFL executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp told me late Sunday night. And there’s little doubt that, though the league treats its 256 regular-season games like home-TV gold, it’s likely to parcel out more than one game to an internet company in 2016.
That will make fans around the world happy. “The streaming quality was fantastic,” said Marcelo Fujimoto, a Cleveland-raised Browns fan who watched in São Paulo, Brazil. “It was like watching a game on TV.”
Vietnam checked in with praise. “It was better than I expected,” said Tyrone Carriaga, another football fan who watched in Ho Chi Minh City. “No freeze screen at all.”