The NFL’s live-stream of last year’s London game between the Jaguars and Bills was so wildly successful that the NFL will be doing it again.
Sorry, that should be the NFL will not be doing it again.
According to Jessica Toonkel of Reuters, the NFL won’t stream any of the three 2016 London games, opting instead to focus on the streaming of the Thursday night games through Twitter.
“When we discussed potential streaming packages with interested parties, there were many options on the table, including the London games,” an NFL spokesman told Reuters. “Ultimately the package we agreed on with Twitter involved ten of our Thursday night games which we felt was the best option at that point.”
On one hand, there was no need to stream a London game because, from an experimentation standpoint, the Twitter streams of Thursday Night Football fill that role. On the other hand, the Bills-Jaguars London live stream supposedly was wildly successful as an alternative to the league’s new approach to European time-zone games, which are being nationally televised at a time when people otherwise would be watching pregame shows.
The decision not to once again make a London game available to a worldwide audience via live streaming underscores the notion that the numbers initially disclosed by the NFL were covered in fluff (and/or something much browner and smellier). As the metrics plummeted from “33.6 million streams!” to “15.6 million users!” to “1.64 million average viewers,” it became clear that the London game performs better if shown on broadcast television. After all, the Jets-Dolphins game in London generated an average audience of 9.86 million viewers.
With Twitter paying little more than $1 million per game for the 10-game Thursday night package, it’s also possible that the NFL opted not to sell the ability to stream a Sunday game because the monetary offers simply weren’t good enough to justify plucking a game away from CBS or FOX.