Comment by gmisra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmisra | Hacker News Reader

Key points:

1. The 15M number is massively inflated for unique viewers, as the game was auto-playing on the Yahoo! and tumblr homepages. More detailed breakdown of the numbers here: http://deadspin.com/not-nearly-as-many-people-watched-bills-...

2. The NFL will not be rolling out a la carte streaming packages any time soon, as they have a preference to selling exclusive rights at a premium, e.g. - DirecTV has exclusive rights to broadcast all games, and stream all games digitally through 2022 (http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11624442/nfl-extends-sunda...) - Verizon has exclusive rights to broadcast all games on smartphones through 2022 (https://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2015/09/live-st...)

3. For comparison, both MLB and NBA offer streaming plans for all of their games, for reasonable prices ($130 for MLB, $200 for NBA). These plans are only limited in not showing local market games. They also have great app support (iOS, Android, Roku, "Smart" TVs, etc)

I find it amazing they offer a brilliant online streaming service but you have to be abroad (Gamepass - I'm UK based).

I pay something like 20GBP a month during football season and get every game live in HD via chromecast, iOS, Web or Android plus redzone. They evidently have the chops and infrastructure to do it but its all a question of running the oligolpoly with the broadcasting services in the US.

The article has been updated at the very bottom. It seems to support your view that 15M greatly overstates the audience:

Update: ESPN is now reporting that the Yahoo stream saw an average minute audience of 2.36 million, and 1.64 million in the U.S. This is lower than the typical Monday Night Football game as well. For instance, last week’s Giants-Eagles MNF audience attracted 13.9 million viewers, said ESPN. The 15.2 million figure instead refers to the total number of uniques who watched some or all of the game’s stream.

the NBA league pass service is also limited because you can't watch nationally televised games ( any games on ESPN, NBAtv, TNT, NBC, ABC, etc etc )

For MLB, IIRC the only exception is for Sunday night games on ESPN. All other national games are non-exclusive: while ESPN/TBS/Fox are broadcasting it nationally, the local stations are broadcasting as well, which can be streamed through the mlb.tv package. Sunday nights are the only games that are national-only, and so can't be streamed through mlb.tv.

Once the playoffs start though, all games are national only, and there are different rules, making the playoff games more difficult to stream.

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