Netflix Pretends It Will Crackdown On VPNs Just Days After Admitting It's Futile To Do So

from the international-whac-a-mole dept

For a few years now, broadcasters have whined endlessly about the use of VPNs to access Netflix in markets where the streaming service had yet to launch. You'll recall that Australian broadcasters in particular loved to throw hissy fits over the use of VPN technology, accusing customers (paying for both Netflix and a VPN) of being "pirates" for refusing to adhere to regional viewing restrictions. Of course, ignored amidst all this whining (and the futile attempts to ban VPNs) was the fact that these users wouldn't be going to these lengths -- if they liked the existing services being made available to them.

Last week, Netflix surprised everybody by announcing the service was now available in 130 additional countries, bringing the grand total of available countries to 190. And while this will certainly force many broadcasters to stop whining about VPNs and start competing, the fact remains that thanks to geographical licensing restrictions, the content being made available to Netflix customers in Canada will look dramatically different to the catalog available to users in Germany. As such, there's been renewed interest in the use of VPNs to engage in what's effectively global Netflix content tourism.

Netflix has made a few token gestures over the last year to appease broadcasters, such as fleeting efforts to thwart VPNs and geo-restriction avoidance tools. Those efforts were already in play in the 60 countries Netflix operated in before this recent expansion. But speaking at CES, Netflix exec Neil Hunt basically admitted that there's not really all that much Netflix can do to stop VPN use, unless they want to waste calories on an international game of Whac-A-Mole:

"We do apply industry standard technologies to limit the use of proxies,” (Netflix chief product officer Neil) Hunt says. “Since the goal of the proxy guys is to hide the source it’s not obvious how to make that work well. It’s likely to always be a cat-and-mouse game. [We] continue to rely on blacklists of VPN exit points maintained by companies that make it their job. Once [VPN providers] are on the blacklist, it’s trivial for them to move to a new IP address and evade."

Clearly Netflix got some blowback for admitting the futility of VPN bans, however, as the company has since posted a new blog post full of non-statements that try to walk back Hunt's comments a little bit:

"Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies."

Now most of the media read this statement to mean Netflix is implementing some severe new assault on VPNs, but if you read the statement carefully all Netflix is saying is it's going to continue using the same tools they've always used. The same tools one of their key executives just got done publicly admitting don't actually work. It's simply not possible to really ban VPN use, but Netflix wants to make partners in its 190 service countries feel comfortable while it slowly but surely works toward eliminating geo-restrictive licensing entirely. Also said by Hunt at CES:

"Our ambition is to do global licensing and global originals, so that over maybe the next five, 10, 20 years, it’ll become more and more similar until it’s not different"..."We don’t buy only for Canada; we’re looking … for all territories; buying a singular territory is not very interesting any more."...“When we have global rights, there’s a significant reduction in piracy pressure on that content. If a major title goes out in the U.S. but not in Europe, it’s definitely pirated in Europe, much more than it is if it’s released simultaneously,” Mr. Hunt says.

More consistent licensing reduces piracy, but it also forces legacy companies to compete and upsets the status quo by weakening local broadcaster power, so expect 2016 to be jam-packed with oodles more hand-wringing over VPN and proxy use by companies terrified of change.

As an aside, if you were curious just how fractured Netflix content availability is by country (often because content rights are sold before Netflix can even bid), Finder this week released a pretty amazing breakdown of what's available by country, an accompanying map highlighting global availability, and a breakdown of what percentage of the U.S. catalog is available in each country.

Filed Under: geoblocking, proxies, streaming, vpns
Companies: netflix

Comcast-Funded Think Tank: Broadband Usage Caps Make Netflix Streaming Better. You're Welcome.

from the sinking-to-new-logical-lows dept

As we've noted for some time, the broadband industry (and all the think tanks and politicians that work for it) have spent the last few years trying to vilify Netflix. That's primarily due to the company's support of net neutrality, but also its opposition to anti-innovative and anti-competitive broadband usage caps. These attacks usually start with the criticism that Netflix now dominates around 37% of peak downstream traffic (as if that's a bad thing), followed by some bizarre and unfounded claim that Netflix should be forced to "pay its fair share" (read: give us a cut of revenues despite us having no legitimate claim to it).

While these assaults had quieted down for a while, Daniel Lyons (not the fake Steve Jobs Daniel Lyons) and the American Enterprise Institute last week came out with a bizarre missive on broadband caps, in which Lyons tries to claim that broadband usage caps are a great way to force Netflix "to become a better corporate netizen." As noted above, Lyons starts by highlighting how Netflix consumes a huge amount of peak Internet capacity:

"Netflix has long reigned as one of America’s most significant Internet-traffic generators. Network equipment company Sandvine reports that the video-streaming company is by far the leader in peak period traffic, responsible for more than 33 percent of all fixed Internet traffic during peak hours — more than twice the share of the next-biggest competitor, YouTube. This means that at times when the Internet is most susceptible to congestion, Netflix alone is responsible for one out of every three packets sent through the network."

For clarity it should be noted that Netflix customers are responsible for this consumption. Netflix consumers who, in the United States, already pay more for bandwidth than consumers in most developing countries. Netflix in turn not only pays for bandwidth, it now pays ISPs for direct interconnection to their networks, after ISPs were accused of intentionally degrading peering points to force its hand. Everybody is paying, and paying, and paying some more -- so it doesn't matter one iota how much bandwidth Netflix is consuming -- because consumers are demanding and (probably over)paying for it.

Back in December, Netflix announced it was making some changes to the way it intelligently encodes its titles. This shift involves encoding titles differently depending on type and genre, since cartoons (with static backgrounds) technically eat less bandwidth than live action movies. The move was prompted by one thing: this month's expansion by Netflix into 130 more countries. Netflix's primary concern? Making sure that networks -- especially of the mobile variety in developing nations -- would have a more consistent and trouble-free viewing experience. It was just a smart, albeit admittedly belated shift in improving the way Netflix operates.

Apparently seeing a flimsy logical opportunity for the ages, Lyons tries to claim that Netflix was forced to improve its efficiency -- solely thanks to the wonder and glory of broadband usage caps:

Usage-based pricing forced Netflix to be more mindful of the size of its digital footprint. Because they face potential overage charges, consumers are becoming more aware of the amount of bandwidth their online activities consume. This leads edge providers such as Netflix to develop more efficient methods of delivery, in response to increased consumer sensitivity. The result is a more efficient operation that benefits everyone by freeing up network capacity — which is like broadband providers improving speeds, but without having to install new network lines."

That's an astonishing, incredible load of bullshit.

Netflix has long allowed capped users to adjust streaming quality to manage consumption, but to claim caps are to thank for these improvements is aggressively dishonest. Lyons and his friends at the AEI are funded by Comcast, the same company that's aggressively expanding utterly unnecessary usage caps on millions of consumers. Those caps have one overarching function: to raise rates on uncompetitive markets, give Comcast's own services an unfair advantage, and to protect Comcast TV revenues from Internet video.

There's clearly some worry on the part of Comcast and its think tank friends that the FCC will finally get off its ass and begin pressing Comcast on its anti-competitive abuse of usage caps, but if this is the best argument the AEI can come up with, Comcast may want to reconsider its disinformation budget for 2016.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, data caps, interconnection, streaming, usage caps
Companies: aei, comcast, netflix

MLB Goes To Court To Defend Antitrust Actions That Go Against All The Progress MLB Has Made

from the swing-and-a-miss dept

We have talked quite a bit about Major League Baseball for a technology site, in no small part due to many of the forward-thinking things the league has done regarding operating its business in the digital age. In the realm of sports streaming, I've typically referred to MLB.TV and the league's Advanced Media products as the gold standard and I think I'm on pretty solid ground in saying so. Beyond that, the league seems poised to embrace expanded streaming options and the dropping of some of its more intrusive blackout rules, positioning the league well in the midst of the cord-cutting epidemic winding its way through the cable television industry.

Which is why it just feels so damn strange to see the league preparing to go to court along with DirecTV and Comcast to argue that it needs many of the practices from which it is actively moving away in order to not only provide more customer choice, but indeed to keep smaller-market teams in business entirely.

The background on this is that in 2014 a court decided that baseball's antitrust exemption could only be applied to core aspects of the business of baseball. Those core aspects traditionally, going back over a hundred years, referred to how MLB interacted with competing leagues and how player contracts would be handled given that players crossed state lines as part of their jobs. In more recent times, MLB attempted to use the antitrust exemption to allow for how it handles broadcast rights and blackouts, specifically arguing that allowing its member teams to negotiate their own national broadcast contracts would allow teams to get a free-ride on the league's popularity, and the court's opinion rejected those arguments in 2014. After that, the court agreed to certify a class action on behalf of fans looking to force Major League Baseball into allowing more inter-competition among its own member teams, which the fans argue would allow for national broadcasts (or national streaming) of any team anywhere in the nation.

MLB is now defending that action in pre-trial documents, apparently with the argument that giving teams more ways to get their product to their fans would result in small-market teams folding up completely, because the Yankees.

Defendants’ position, which will be substantiated at trial, is that the territorial rules enhance the overall quality of MLB live telecasts, which in turn enhances the ability of these telecasts to compete with other programming. (See Defs. Trial Mem. at 12-13.) The evidence will also show that eliminating the territorial rules would reduce the ability of certain small-market teams to invest in players and other resources, hampering their ability to compete on the field—and could, over time, prevent certain clubs from remaining viable.

This is similar to comments made by league commissioner Rob Manfred during deposition, where he specifically cited the New York nine as an example of why allowing more broadcast options would eventually limit broadcast options by eliminating teams and markets entirely.

"[A] lot of New Yorkers go down to Florida, and we think that [if the Yankees] go down [it] would kind of destroy that market for Tampa," he said. "[T]here are certain iconic, generally large market clubs that I believe have national appeal that would put them in a position to present a threat to the viability of certain of our smaller market clubs."

It's an argument that essentially claims that MLB must limit the number of broadcast options customers have to choose from because not limiting them will eventually lead to even less options when teams fold. This argument rests on MLB's revenue sharing practice, where teams negotiate their local broadcast rights and leave the national rights entirely up to the league, which then doles out national broadcast (and streaming) revenue democratically through the league, meaning the popularity of the Yankees and other large market clubs is resulting in income for small market teams (like the Tampa Bay Rays).

Here's the thing: everyone knows this argument's time was twenty years ago. Fans know it, because they use the internet and streaming services and they embody the desire of customers to watch more teams in more ways without blackout restrictions. MLB knows this as well, as you simply can't make sense of all the work the league has done to expand its streaming options without that knowledge. What they are trying to save in all of this is a bit of the right to still handle national streaming rights the way they handle national broadcast rights. It's about retaining control. But the league itself is what allowed for the expansion of the league into small market areas. For them now to rest the argument for their antitrust exemption on the un-viability of those markets, resulting in harming consumer choice, doesn't make any sense. It's essentially asking for a kind of bailout for some teams via the exemption. Put another way, MLB's argument amounts to: some of our teams don't have enough fans to sustain themselves, so we need an antitrust exemption to keep them afloat, just because. How is that in the public's interest, even if MLB's assessment is correct?

And here's the other thing: they're probably wrong. Major League Baseball is enjoying an immense level of popularity at the moment, finally recovering from the player lockout all those years ago. How does it benefit a small market team for the government to bless MLB's ownership of that team's ability to reach more fans, new fans, and other markets via its own negotiation of national streaming rights? Artificially limiting the reach of teams in an era where the ability to do national streaming is less costly doesn't enhance that team's viability; it limits it.

We'll have to see how this plays out, but the good news is that MLB knows all of this already. I'm actually a bit surprised it is even bothering with any of this.

Filed Under: anti-trust, baseball, streaming
Companies: mlb

No, WSJ, Baseball Revenues Don't HAVE To Come Down Due To Cord-Cutting

from the new-baseball-business-models dept

As a Techdirt reader, the business of professional baseball is not required reading. That said, for many reasons, the baseball business aligns nicely with many of the topics we discuss here, and baseball in general is probably the math-iest of sports. That's why it seems necessary to push back on this Chicken Little piece at the Wall Street Journal, which claims that the laughably large baseball contracts players are signing today are doomed to drop precipitously because of cord-cutting.

At first blush, the premise here might even seem reasonable.

But there is one question looming over the sport, even as it indulges in another no-holds-barred cashapalooza. Salaries in baseball have been rising without fail ever since the advent of free agency in 1975. But for the first time, there are real warnings from responsible people that the party may be coming to an end.

As more people downgrade their cable service for smaller bundles of channels, or “cut the cord” by disconnecting from cable in favor of online streaming services, or just decline to ever subscribe, the economics of baseball will take a hit. MLB teams will no longer be able to ask cable services to pay a premium for the right to show their games. If they can’t find other sources of revenue to make up for this, it’s hard to imagine salaries to escalate at this rate in perpetuity.

The qualifier built into the premise is the premise's undoing. "If they can't find other sources of revenue" with regards to broadcast contracts, amounts to, more generally, "If baseball doesn't make as much money they won't pay the players as much." Well, yes, obviously. The problem is that no professional sport has positioned itself as well for cord-cutting as has Major League Baseball. As we've discussed at length in the past, MLB's Advanced Media product is the gold standard in sports streaming, so much so that other sports leagues are actually piggy-backing off of the MLB.TV product for use in their own sports. In addition, while the WSJ presents all this as some kind of surprise doomsday on the near horizon, MLB has been prepping for this for some time. We've already seen the league and its teams embrace streaming options with the current broadcast partners, as well as look to end the old blackout rules that would hamper streaming availability. What the WSJ piece attempts to paint is a picture in which it sees the doom coming, but MLB does not and is blithely handing out huge player contracts unwittingly. Baseball has done nothing to demonstrate that kind of ignorance, though, and in fact has done everything to demonstrate instead its willingness to be out in front of cord-cutting.

Vince Gennaro, the director of the graduate sports management program at Columbia University, said he wonders if the current deals between teams and cable services are sustainable. “These are major strategic issues that the consumer is going to have a large vote in,” he said, adding that he is not sure that baseball’s regional networks have an accurate view of the threat they’re facing. “Are the networks reading the market right? Are they reading the consumer right?”

Valid questions, but not when it comes to MLB revenue and player contracts. There is nothing in the cord-cutting trend to indicate that baseball viewership is going away. And the viewers are all that matters for revenue purposes. In fact, the cord-cutting trend has quickened as sports streaming becomes more widely available. That would seem to indicate that fans are simply trading television broadcasts for streams which, while it may hurt the local broadcast partners, presents no reason why it should hurt revenue overall, thereby affecting player contracts.

In the end, the article does a lot of hand-wringing over the questions it itself is asking, and yet the league and teams are moving forward confidently. That should tell you everything you need to know about whether or not the league is prepared for cord-cutting.

Filed Under: baseball, cable, cord cutting, revenues, streaming, tv
Companies: mlb

And Away We Go: NFL Wants All Thursday Games To Be Streamed Next Season

from the its-beginning dept

We said the trickle would eventually become a waterfall, and it appears to be happening. As cord-cutting continues unabated, the last strand keeping the cable television cancellation orders from avalanching in has been access to sporting events. But what began a ways back as a couple of leagues experimenting with stream offerings has more recently seen teams and leagues look seriously at the future of broadcast deals and how to wedge internet streaming into them. The king of the professional sports leagues is, of course, the National Football League. You may recall that the NFL experimented earlier this year by offering one of the worst games being played overseas only via streaming on Yahoo's site. Well, while the viewership numbers didn't mirror a television broadcast, pretty much everyone that matters realized that the 2.5 million viewers per minute that Yahoo's stream generated was a big win for the first ever streamed-only NFL game.

But perhaps even I underestimated what a success it was in the NFL's eyes, because I didn't expect them to begin immediately exploring full-streaming broadcast options for every Thursday Night NFL game as early as next season.

The occasionally maligned TNF is still a big moneymaker for everyone involved. CBS is paying $300 million this year, and doesn’t even get to broadcast a full slate. (CBS produces all 16 games, but NFL Network airs the final eight.) The ratings are great, and consistently up from previous years. And yet, Thursday night seems like the place for the NFL to experiment. Unlike all its other long-term TV deals, the NFL has been going year-to-year with TNF, and the bidding for the next contract, just opening now, is for a one-year deal with a league option.

But here’s the really interesting part:

The league also sent RFPs to several digital companies, like Google, Yahoo, Apple and Amazon, to stream the entire Thursday night schedule on a non-exclusive basis, sources said. The league’s initial plan would have the digital streams serve as a simulcast of the television production — with the same ads and in-game production features.

What's interesting in this is that whoever is streaming the game would be simply rebroadcasting it over the internet, rather than having to sell separate advertising content. That would be both useful and limiting for the stream-provider. Useful, because it avoids the annoyance of repetitive ads due to low inventory, but limiting in that it limits how the stream-provider can monetize the stream.

But what the NFL's interest in streaming should really do is strike fear in the heart of businesses that have been burying their heads in the sand when it comes to cord-cutting, because wider sports streaming is going to hasten the pace.

Filed Under: football, streaming
Companies: nfl

Advertising Is Content: The Threat To Streaming Sports Posed By A Tiny Advertisement Inventory

from the jingle-this dept

I've talked about the coming and evolving world of wider streaming in professional and major college sports for quite a while now. Even measuring only the past few years, streaming of sporting events has seen immense progress, from the leagues themselves getting on board and expanding options, to broadcast partners opening up their product online, to forward-looking team owners recognizing that the future is in streaming. Wide-spread streaming sports is going to happen, due to all of the above and the fact that cord-cutting is simply not going to go away.

Which isn't to say there aren't barriers to hurdle as progress is made. Today, I want to talk about one of them: the horrifically small advertising inventory too many sports streams have. Ads that become annoying due to repetition isn't a new concept. There is even a TV Tropes page for it. But what for television is repeated ads as a mild annoyance due to poor scheduling or the notion that repetition makes ads more effective is something entirely different for the current crop of online stream ads. What we're dealing with today is repetition of the same ads or ads for the same products/services over and over and over again, in break after break, often times repeated within breaks, all because the inventory is too low.

Contrary to what you might think, this isn't a small problem. Not every person needs to use the bathroom at every commercial break. For sporting events in particular, this becomes a greater issue because the natural breaks in game action often times mean that commercial breaks will occasionally occur in near proximity to one another. Repeated ads in this case over the course of an entire event aren't just annoying, they're absolutely jarring to the viewer.

An anecdote: most of my NFL viewing occurs in my kitchen, typically using one of the streaming services, while I cook my family's Sunday dinner. It's a tradition in my house that I do dinners on Sunday. Having the NFL Foxsports.com stream on my tablet in the kitchen made my wife angrily leave the room entirely and refuse to come back. I'm not exaggerating. There was a particular commercial featuring a certain quarterback saying random things in the sing-song of a particular company's jingle that, over the course of roughly fifteen minutes, was played no less than ten times. It made her hate the stream, the advertiser, and probably me for having it on in the first place. Whatever advertising is hoping to achieve, the broadcaster cannot accept it causing viewers to literally leave the room in annoyance.

Television doesn't have this problem currently, because the ad inventory is much higher. If you see an ad repeated two or three times during a single game, it's no big deal. I'd guess that I saw three or four total ads on Fox's stream something like thirty times each during the course of one game. That can't go on. It makes the streaming product less valuable and less desirable. If advertising is content, and it is, then that content must never cause us to turn away and hide from it.

Filed Under: ads, advertising, content, oversaturation, repeats, sports, streaming

FilmOn Loses A Second Case, Meaning That Supreme Court May Get A Second Shot At Aereo Decision

from the it-ain't-over-'til-alki-david-sings dept

Earlier this year, lots of copyright law watchers were taken by surprise when Alki David's video streaming service, FilmOn (though its name constantly has changed) actually won a case in California. If you don't recall, the service was a sort of fake knock-off of Aereo, enabling streaming broadcast TV service on the internet. Alki David, an eccentric, publicity-hound wealthy guy, had been sued earlier with a similar service, using a different technical infrastructure, and had responded with some ridiculous countersuits. When Aereo hit the scene, and had been carefully vetted by copyright lawyers who believed (strongly) that it was following the letter of the law, David suddenly declared that FilmOn was using the same micro-antenna infrastructure and got sued.

In the early days, Aereo was winning its cases, while FilmOn was losing its cases. It was so ridiculous that I heard conspiracy theories that the Hollywood-connected (he likes to promote the fact that he's acted in some movies) David had actually set up FilmOn as something of a legal foil to Aereo to set precedents in one direction. That's probably too big of a conspiracy theory, but either way, Aereo made it to the Supreme Court and famously lost when the Court made up its weird "looks like a duck" test, saying that Aereo "looked" like a cable TV system, and that Aereo's service was a "public performance" and thus infringing.

After the dust settled, people realized that, based on the Supreme Court ruling, it sounded like an earlier 2nd Circuit appeals court ruling in 2011 over a company named ivi was possibly overturned. ivi offered a similar service, but claimed that it was a cable TV service and just had to pay compulsory Section 111 fees to rebroadcast broadcast television. Aereo and FilmOn both quickly pivoted in their cases to argue that if the Supreme Court said they "looked like" cable, then the ivi ruling was no longer good law, and they, too, should be able to operate just by paying the compulsory licenses. For Aereo, the lower court didn't buy it. It wasn't going that well for FilmOn either, with a NY court actually holding the company in contempt for pushing this argument.

And then there was the California ruling from earlier this year... followed up this week by another loss for FilmOn (found via Eriq Gardner at THResq), this time in DC. The ruling itself is apparently under seal so the exact reasoning is not clear, but it appears that a real circuit split is potentially developing, meaning there's a real chance that, at the very least, the issue of whether or not online streaming services can just pay Section 111 compulsory fees could end up before the court. It would be somewhat ridiculous and hilarious if FilmOn ended up winning that argument, while Aereo (and ivi) got completely shut down. Copyright law can be weird sometimes.

Filed Under: alki david, broadcast tv, cable tv, copyright, section 111, streaming, tv
Companies: aereo, filmon

Cable CEO Is Really Pissed That HBO Hasn't Cracked Down On Streaming Password Sharing

from the get-over-it dept

As HBO's streaming service popularity has taken off, the company has yet to crack down on the sharing of passwords, believing it's a great opportunity to have programming junkies market the brand for you. We all of course already knew that sharing HBO Go passwords was a violation of the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA and an unholy sin. But according to Charter CEO Tom Rutledge, the sharing of streaming service passwords is also a diabolical theft of content that needs to stop immediately.

During the cable giant's recent quarterly earnings call, Rutledge decided to rant a bit about the perceived injustice of college students using their parents' passwords, insisting that HBO's leniency on this front showed a complete misundertanding of the market:

"But to Rutledge, companies like HBO show a "complete lack of control and understanding in the space" by letting password sharing continue, and it's something that must be stopped. "The lack of control over the content by content companies and authentication processes has reduced the demand for video because you don’t have to pay for it,” Mr. Rutledge said on the earnings call. “That’s going on in the college market."

But it's Rutledge who appears to have shown his lack of understanding of the market he serves. The CEO assumes that if you crack down on college kids sharing HBO passwords that these kids are magically going to go out and sign up for cable connections. What's more likely to happen should you crack down on the practice is that that these kids (most of whom are on a budget) will turn to cheaper streaming alternatives like Netflix -- or piracy. But in traditional legacy exec thinking, everybody's a criminal, even though Rutledge's company simply refuses to seriously compete on price.

Earlier this year HBO CEO Richard Plepler said the company keeps a close eye on the password sharing stats, and it's not really a significant number of people. Plepler (the guy Rutledge implies doesn't understand the market) a year earlier made it clear he understood the market perfectly well:

"It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, it just has no impact on the business,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler said. It is, in many ways, a “terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers,” he said, noting that it could potentially lead to more subscribers in the future. “We’re in the business of creating addicts,” he said.

So, whereas HBO thinks it's a good idea to turn the other cheek on a statistically insignificant practice to generate brand obsession, Charter (soon to own Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in a $75+ billion merger) thinks it's a better idea to treat college kids like criminals, and in the process, driving them to Netflix and BitTorrent networks.

Filed Under: cable, competition, hbo, password sharing, streaming, tom rutledge
Companies: charter, hbo

Yahoo Pumps Up Viewership Numbers For NFL Game By Autoplaying It On Your Yahoo Home Page

from the your-not-helping dept

Over the summer, when the NFL and Yahoo inked a deal for a one-game test run of an NFL game exclusively streamed by a service provider, I tried to temper everyone's excitement. Baby steps, is what I called the deal, which it absolutely was. In many ways, the NFL either set this all up to minimize risk to its reputation and revenue, or set it up to fail, depending on who you believe. The game featured two teams expected to be bad, with followings and markets on the smaller side of the league, and the game was played overseas in the UK absurdly early in the morning in all the time zones state-side. That meant that the game would never have the viewership that a prime-time matchup between two good teams might have, but that probably worked for the NFL's test run, in that any failure would be minimized for all the reasons listed above.

Well, the streamed game happened this past weekend. The results? Pretty good, actually.

Sunday's live stream marked the first time that a single company had distributed an NFL telecast all around the world via the Internet. It was widely seen as a test for future NFL streaming efforts. The NFL said Monday that it was "thrilled with the results." Technical reviews were mixed, with many fans reporting a seamless live stream, while others ran into connectivity trouble. Average viewership per minute was high by web live-streaming standards, but low by NFL TV standards.

The average viewership per minute reported by Yahoo was about 2.5 million, which is quite large by streaming standards. By comparison, though, that viewership is something like a third or a quarter of the viewership for most NFL television broadcasts. Still, considering the game started in the wee hours of the morning (4:30am Central Time, for instance), nobody was scoffing at the numbers. In fact, the NFL announced it was "thrilled" with the results.

And that really should have been enough. Unfortunately, Yahoo also stated that 15 million viewers had watched at least part of the live stream as well, which was quickly shown to be largely bullshit the company concocted by counting, oh, anyone who visited Yahoo's home page.

All morning long, if you visited Yahoo.com on a PC, you were greeted with an autoplay stream of the broadcast, including commercials, but without sound. Yahoo says 43 million people a day visit its homepage. That number is presumably lower on a Sunday morning. But if it can get a big chunk of those visitors to see a couple minutes each, it will be in good shape — at least by the low bar it laid out for itself.

You're not helping, Yahoo. Look, wider streaming of professional sports is going to happen. And advertisers and leagues are going to end up coming along for the ride because, no matter what your local cable company tells you, cord-cutting is a thing and it isn't slowing down. But trying these little gimmicks to fudge the numbers will only set back the willingness of leagues and advertisers to jump into this. It creates a trust problem, similar to that experienced by other internet advertising gimmicks, where ads are reported to have been seen after being autoplayed, whether they were truly watched or not. This was a big moment for those of us that believe streaming sports is the future. Whatever you think about the viewership results, they weren't disappointing the principal players involved in this entertainment game. For Yahoo to sully the waters in a transparent and obvious way was silly, as it could only hurt its own effort to secure future streaming deals.

Still, the rest of the news about the streamed NFL game was positive.

Filed Under: football, metrics, streaming, video, viewership
Companies: nfl, yahoo