The drop in prime-time TV viewership for the recent Rio Olympics was a bit of a head-scratcher for many, especially in light of the soaring numbers for online viewership of the same games on various streaming outlets. In the STADIUM TECH REPORT PODCAST episode 7, hosts Phil Harvey and Paul Kapustka explore and explain why this shift from scripted to live happened, and what it means for all types of live sports content going forward. Give it a listen now!
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Screen shot of DirecTV Sunday Ticket app for iPad
Today, AT&T announced that all subscribers to the DirecTV Sunday Ticket plan “will be able to stream Sunday afternoon out-of-market football games to almost any device” when action kicks off this fall. Previously, Sunday Ticket subscribers had to shell out about an extra hundred bucks to get the Sunday Ticket Max package, which offered streaming. Last year, the basic Sunday Ticket package was about $250; so far we can’t find a price for this season (and we don’t want to hunt through all the splash screens trying to get us to sign up for DirecTV services). Suffice to say it will still be a premium product, but one that many NFL fans can’t live without.
According to AT&T, live streaming via the Sunday Ticket plan was up 35 percent last year, a figure that doesn’t surprise us at all. We’ve been tracking Verizon Wireless and its NFL Mobile package of live-streamed games (which varies but usually includes Monday, Thursday and any weekend games, as well as Sunday out-of-market games) for some time now, and posts about NFL Mobile typically draw the highest traffic to our site. Verizon has never released subscriber numbers for NFL Mobile, but if you guessed it was among the most popular sports apps out there, you would probably be right. Even at $1 billion for four years, the rights fees seem a bargain for Verizon.
DirecTV pays the NFL more (about $1.5 billion a year, according to reports) but it gets more; NFL Mobile is exclusive to cell phone devices, meaning you can’t use it on tablets or PCs. And now thrown into the mobile mix is Twitter, whose reported $10 million deal with the NFL for Thursday-night games also includes the rights to stream to cell phones and any other device. Anyone else out there want to play?
Why is NFL action so popular on mobile devices? Mainly, I think, because of several factors, including fantasy betting and the fact that the screens have gotten so big and sharp, you can actually watch a game on a phone and it’s not painful. As many of us mobile-NFL freaks know, the best part of the deals isn’t necessarily the games themselves, but instead it’s access to the NFL’s RedZone channel, which keeps you up to date on action all across the league (and despite its name, it offers way more than just plays “in the red zone.” They try to keep live action going at all times, and NO COMMMERCIALS makes it a football junkie’s dream).
Plus, on the West coast, RedZone will often just show all of later games since there are fewer contests to jump in between. I don’t know how many people will sit every Sunday through several games on the couch, but if you can watch a few minutes or a final drive while you’re somewhere else it’s pretty addictive.
No news yet this year from Verizon on what the NFL Mobile package of games might look like, but stay tuned: This battle is just getting started. Good news is, more competition means more access and lower prices for fans. That’s something we can all cheer, no matter which teams we root for.
The big news from the NFL today was a deal signed with Twitter, under which Twitter will get to stream live NFL Thursday Night games online to any connected device, including smartphones. To us, that last bit is the most interesting part of the deal since it breaks the previous stronghold held by Verizon Wireless and its NFL Mobile deal, under which Verizon was previously the sole provider of live NFL action to smartphones.
While many NFL games have been streamed by various entities online — including recent years’ playoff games, the Super Bowl and Monday Night Football — for most of those “broadcasts” you could only watch on a phone-type device if you were a Verizon customer and used the NFL Mobile app. The only exception we know of for U.S. fans was the extra-price DirecTV Sunday Ticket package, which also allowed for mobile viewing; but for free online action, you could typically only watch on a PC, connected TV or a tablet — smartphones were the exclusive domain of Verizon.
Under the Twitter deal, fans who are Twitter users will be able to watch Thursday night games free of any other charge, on tablets, PCs, connected TVs and smartphones, according to a release today from the NFL and Twitter. In addition to live action, the league and Twitter promise pre-game extras like Periscope broadcasts from teams and players, meaning you will get low-quality jittery interviews instead of professionally produced material. But we jest. The Periscope broadcasts could be cool, especially if they are on the field where fans never really get to be.
The Twitter deal follows on the heels of last season’s Yahoo-streamed game, which attracted 15.2 million viewers. It will be interesting to see what the numbers are for Twitter this year, since the Thursday night games will be available on regular TV from both NBC and CBS, which have five games each, as well as on the NFL Network, which will simulcast all games on Thursday nights.
Remember when college basketball tournament season only had a small slice of games available online? Or when you had to pay extra to watch online? It wasn’t that long ago. Thankfully though the future is here now and for 2016 the college hoops postseason has even more ways to watch games mobile or online, including one option to watch games via virtual reality programming.
Like last year, if you have a qualifying cable contract, you are basically covered and should be able to watch all the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games live, on whichever platform you want. The best way to start is to head to the NCAA’s March Madness home page, where you should be able to find any and all information on devices, apps and other avenues to streaming coverage. According to Turner Sports, the NCAA and CBS Sports the games will be available live on 12 different platforms, including Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku players and Roku TV models. The new March Madness Live app isn’t avalable until Thursday, so check back soon for the go-to app for everything March Madness.
Also like last year, you should be able to watch a few minutes of the first game you see without having to log in — great if you are just trying to catch a buzzer beater. The games of course will be available on regular TV, and the March Madness home page has what may be a great time saver, a widget that helps you find those obscure cable channels other than CBS or TNT where the games might be on. Since we’ve just moved, MSR’s NCAA viewing team might make good use of the Zip Code-powered channel finder.
Even if you don’t have a cable contract you can still watch a lot of games that are streamed online; games broadcast on CBS will be available for no charge on desktop, mobile and tablet platforms, while games broadcast on the other channels (TNT, TBS, truTV and local channels) should be available on those providers’ websites. Again, if you get stuck or lost just defaulting back to the March Madness home page should give you a path to whatever game it is you’re looking for.
If you have a NextVR platform you will be able to watch the 2016 Big East tournament (it starts Thursday, March 10) thanks to a partnership between FOX Sports and NextVR. We’re not VR-savvy here at MSR headquarters yet but with seven games and 15 hours of programming scheduled this might be a cool treat for VR fans. NextVR has an instruction page on how to watch the games in VR; if anyone tries this out, send us an email with a report on how it worked (or didn’t) and we’ll let everyone else know.
Also, don’t forget — this year for the first time the NCAA Men’s Championship game, scheduled for Monday, April 4, will be on TBS, NOT on CBS, the first time the champs game has been only on cable. And, there will be streaming options as well during Final Four weekend, according to the official announcement:
For the NCAA Final Four National Semifinals on Saturday, April 2, from Houston, NCAA March Madness Live will provide three distinct live video streams of both games to provide unprecedented viewing options for fans – live streaming of the traditional game coverage provided on TBS, along with “Team Stream by Bleacher Report” coverage or team-specific presentations offered via TNT and truTV. This year’s NCAA Tournament will include the National Championship airing on TBS, the first time the championship has ever been televised on cable television.
Screen shot of new NBA app under development. Photo: NBA
Though YinzCam previously listed 23 NBA teams as current clients, including all 22 it will redesign apps for, under the new deal it appears that the team apps will have access to much deeper NBA content, including direct access to watch or listen to live games. Here is one of two very interesting paragraphs from the press release:
The new apps will personalize the home screen experience based on the fan’s location. Core game information, such as stats, play-by-play and box score, will remain accessible, however, the most relevant features, based on a fan’s location and game status, will be delivered to the home screen. Features such as seat upgrades and in-seat delivery will be surfaced within the app for fans at the game, while fans outside of the venue will be exposed to more extensive game coverage, video and news.
The most significant part of the above paragraph is the mention of features like seat upgrades and in-seat concession delivery, services that have not been a standard part of the YinzCam stadium/venue app offering, which in the past focused mainly on delivering content, like stats, live video and instant replays. We have an interview scheduled soon with YinzCam CEO Priya Narasimhan to find out whether or not YinzCam is building the software behind these features itself, or whether it is drafting a third party to supply the code.
Screen shot of Super Bowl app developed by YinzCam.
On the content side, the new NBA team apps will have “watch” and “listen” features that will let fans listen to or watch live games. According to the NBA, the watch/listen features will deep-link fans to either a regional sports network broadcast, or national games via the WatchESPN app or the Watch TNT app, or to the NBA’s League Pass broadcast via the NBA app. To watch the games fans would need a qualifying cable contract for the RSN games, and would need a League Pass subscription ($199.99) for those broadcasts.
The NBA and YinzCam also said that the new apps would include support for Twitter’s mobile development platform, Fabric, which will allow fans who are logged into Twitter on their devices to “tweet, retweet and favorite directly from the team app.” Direct integration of Twitter activity is an interesting twist, since in most cases fans at games spend far more time using apps like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram than team or venue apps.
According to the release YinzCam will redesign team apps for the Atlanta Hawks, Brooklyn Nets, Charlotte Hornets, Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers, Denver Nuggets, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies, Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans, New York Knicks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, Portland Trail Blazers, San Antonio Spurs, and Utah Jazz. Though the Washington Wizards are listed as a YinzCam client on YinzCam’s website, they are not included in the new-app redesign list.
Though the terms of the NBA’s equity investment in YinzCam aren’t described, our guess is that the deal is similar to the one YinzCam struck with the NFL, where YinzCam provided a slice of equity in exchange for content broadcast rights via its team and venue apps. YinzCam founder Narasimhan, who has historically eschewed venture capital in building her 30-person company, said exchanging equity for access to content was a smart deal especially for a firm that couldn’t afford to pay rights fees like the $1 billion Verizon paid the NFL for the right to show live content via its NFL Mobile app. YinzCam has a great relationship with the NFL, and was the provider of the Super Bowl stadium app at Feburary’s Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Ariz.
In an interview with Narasimhan earlier this summer, she spoke of the growing importance of fans using apps both inside and outside the arenas; in the press release with the NBA some of that thinking apparently surfaced, in a description about having automated location-based content surface in each app:
The new apps will personalize the home screen experience based on the fan’s location. Core game information, such as stats, play-by-play and box score, will remain accessible, however, the most relevant features, based on a fan’s location and game status, will be delivered to the home screen. Features such as seat upgrades and in-seat delivery will be surfaced within the app for fans at the game, while fans outside of the venue will be exposed to more extensive game coverage, video and news.
The NBA deal follows YinzCam’s deal last year to become the preferred supplier of mobile apps for Learfield Sports, a partnership that Narasimhan said has already resulted in 30 new clients.
One final YinzCam nugget for now:
— Where did the company name come from? Narasimhan says YinzCam is a mashup of the Pittsburgh term “You ones” (a linguistic equivalent of the Southern “y’all”), which when pronounced quickly in a Pittsburgh accent sounds like “Yinz” and “camera” for the personal video the app supplies.
The early numbers are in, and according to Yahoo and the NFL there were 15.2 million unique viewers of Sunday’s first-ever online-only streaming of an NFL game, a 34-31 victory by the Jacksonville Jaguars over the Buffalo Bills from Wembley Stadium in London.
While there were some reports of problems with the stream — mainly fuzzy and pixelated pictures — according to the NFL and Yahoo the streaming saw “an average rebuffering ratio of less than 1%” during the 480 million total video minutes served up. The streaming broadcast also saw 33.6 million discrete streams, which meant that many of the unique viewers either clicked on and off, or restarted their streams (maybe after experiencing some of that “rebuffering”). While I don’t agree with Business Insider’s view that the event was a “disaster” the choppiness and possible drops might have been annoying to some who have never viewed live events online before. Maybe we’re immune because we watch so much sports online, but c’mon, you have to allow for the fact that this is live video transversing a best-effort network, which on one level is still pretty amazing. Now if they could just find something other than a weirdo Matthew McConaughey ad we’d be fine.
Interestingly, 33 percent of the streams were from international sources, meaning that such exercises could possibly help the NFL expand its live-action reach outside of its traditional U.S. broadcast boundaries. Since the game wasn’t on live TV (except for local markets) it’s not a surprise that it was most likely the highest-ever total audience for a streaming sports event; SB Nation has a good roundup of the numbers and media observers’ takes on the event.
Mobile Sports Report watched the stream for a bit, both online via a browser and on our phone, and we were part of that 1 percent that experienced fuzzy/pixelated views, mainly on the laptop. What was interesting was that Verizon’s NFL Mobile app also carried the game, in perfect sync with the browser view; the Yahoo page viewed via the phone, however, was about 11 seconds ahead of the regular web page view, which we found puzzling.
Also somewhat surprised there are no "extras" in the Yahoo stream, like multiple camera angles, all-22, etc. This is like any other game
— paulkaps (@paulkaps) October 25, 2015
Our other take on the event was mainly about how vanilla it was — the stream had none of the extras or features we’ve come to expect from online offerings, like a replay timeline, multiple camera angles, or choices on commentators, like the college football megacasts. We’re not sure if that was due to Yahoo’s desire to keep it simple to make the delivery easier, or if the NFL didn’t want frills, but by and large it felt like just another NFL game. Since we regularly watch NFL games digitally, either on the phone via NFL Mobile or online via ESPN or Fox or NBC it didn’t seem very revolutionary to us. Maybe next time the NFL can step up its game and use more of the medium. With the numbers and audience, it seems like a no-brainer to try.
Our latest report provides an in-depth look at the new Wi-Fi 6 network deployed at Coors Field, ahead of the All-Star Game. READ THE ISSUE NOW
