More than 15M people watched the NFL’s first-ever live-streamed game on Yahoo

15.2 million people watched the first-ever live-streamed football game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars on Yahoo this past Sunday. The event served as an initial step for the NFL to regularly offer live-streaming services in the future.

According to Yahoo, it saw 33.6 million streams, accounting for over 460 million total minutes, which means an average of the 15.2 million viewers stuck around for 30 minutes. These numbers suggest that some viewers were occasionally reloading their streams or leaving and then coming back to watch.

The 1080p 60fps streaming technology held up pretty well during the game. Yahoo hasn’t mentioned anything yet about breaking any records, but thus far, the most simultaneous viewers’ award goes to YouTube who drew in eight million concurrent spectators during Felix Baumgartner’s freefall from the edge of space.

According to a CNN Money report, Yahoo paid at least $10 million for rights to the game. It was available for free online and was supported by advertising. Yahoo promised advertisers 3.5 million viewers in the United States, which means the company surpassed its expectations greatly.

The Bills/Jags game may be considered more of a low-profile one due to the fact that it started at 9:30 a.m. and was filmed in London. But had it have been aired in the U.S., the NFL wouldn’t have been able to pull in viewers from 185 countries to stream it online.

“We are incredibly excited by the fact that we took a game that would have been viewed by a relatively limited television audience in the United States and by distributing it digitally were able to attract a global audience of over 15 million viewers,” said Hans Schroeder, Senior Vice President, Media Strategy, Business Development & Sales for the NFL, in a statement.

While this game was just an experiment for the NFL, by opening up the games to Internet companies like Yahoo and Google, the NFL hopes to create bidding competition for the broadcast rights. And having Internet companies regularly bit against DirectTV, ESPN, NBC, FOX, and CBS would be a major win for the NFL.

Via Ars Technica