Internet company Yahoo has been selected by American football’s National Football League to deliver the first ever live stream of a regular-season game from the league for free to viewers worldwide.
Yahoo will provide live coverage of the NFL International Series game in London, UK between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, October 25.
Coverage of the game will be available on multiple platforms, including Yahoo, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Screen and Tumblr.
According to media news website Variety, other internet companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon were contacted by the league before the deal was agreed.
Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s senior vice-president for media strategy, business development and sales, told the New York Times newspaper that Yahoo had been chosen because of its connections to advertisers, its worldwide reach and its technical ability to handle a large number of simultaneous viewers.
The digital distribution rights to many games are locked up until at least 2022, but Schroeder said that the league is on a year-to-year contract with the CBS network for its ‘Thursday Night Football’ package and is considering whether to offer streaming of those games to new partners.
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll know a lot more after we do this test with Yahoo.”