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Yahoo To Stream NFL London Game Globally for Free

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http://arstechnica.com/business/201...am-regular-season-game-across-globe-for-free/

On Wednesday, Yahoo announced a partnership with the NFL to digitally stream a single regular-season football game across the globe for free—a first for the NFL.

The game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, which will take place on October 25 in London, will also air "exclusively" on Yahoo's Web and app platforms across the globe, with the exception of the teams' local TV affiliates—meaning that no cable or satellite network, including paid services like DirecTV Sunday Ticket, will air the game. Yahoo will rely on a CBS crew to produce the broadcast, but no further details about the match's presentation were announced. Also unannounced is whether Yahoo's streams to other countries will have other languages dubbed over the action.

This confirms the news we heard in a March announcement about plans to globally stream the contest, though at the time, neither a provider nor any possible price had been confirmed. A Sports Illustrated report on the announcement claimed that other potential bidders for the digital rights had been turned down due to their desire to attach a pay-per-view charge to the match; meanwhile, an NFL spokesperson told Sports Business Daily that the league had reached out to companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple before signing on with Yahoo.

The airing's free nature is particularly unique, since the NFL's last online-streaming experiment, February's Super Bowl XLIX, was only free to watch in the United States and Mexico. That ad-supported digital broadcast still cost $9.99 to watch anywhere else online. Yahoo had better hope that the combination of internal ad sales and hype will make up for the deal's purported "eight-figure" cost reported by CNN.

The news comes following the NFL's March decision to loosen its decades-old rules about blacking out local game broadcasts due to poor ticket sales, noting at the time that the league didn't black out a single 2014-15 game.
 

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