Football Fans #WatchWithTheWorld During the First Free Global Live Stream of an NFL Game on Yahoo
By Adam Cahan, SVP Product and Engineering
The Jacksonville Jaguars triumphed over the Bills yesterday in a four point game, live from London’s Wembley Stadium, but the real winners were NFL fans who tuned in for the first free, global live stream of a regular season NFL game on Yahoo. A truly historic event, this was the first time users were able to enjoy the NFL’s premium content globally without cable, authentication or TV across both Yahoo and Tumblr.
A few fun facts about yesterday’s event:
- We saw 33.6M streams of the game and over 15.2M unique viewers tuned in for one of the largest live streamed sporting events in history.
- Football fans streamed over 460 million total minutes of the game across devices.
- 33% of those streams came 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.
- We performed a technical first with rebuffering ratio of nearly 1%, while delivering over 8.5 petabytes to end users.
We couldn’t be more proud that the NFL chose Yahoo to bring football to fans around the world through this unique live stream experience. We’re seeing more and more people shift away from TV and we’re thrilled to join the NFL in setting a new standard for sports programming.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone at Yahoo who made this possible across our product, engineering, design, partnerships, marketing, sales, editorial, studios, customer care and PR teams; and to our users and fans around the world–thank you! This was an event that makes all of us proud to be a Yahoo.



