YouTube kicked off the NFL’s first season in which each and every one of its regular season games will be available over-the-top via streaming, and it did so in style.
The top streaming platform enjoyed an all-time personal best for average-minute-audience on a live stream, generating an AMA global viewership of 17.3 million watchers Friday for the season opener featuring the San Diego Chargers defeating the defending AFC Champion Kansas City Chiefs 24-20, live — live! — from São Paulo, Brazil.
Also according to Nielsen data, in the U.S., for which the game was also available via virtual MVPD YouTube TV, the AMA was 16.2 million.
The game was streamed to more than 230 countries worldwide.
YouTube paid the league a reported $100 million for the exclusive rights to stream the game globally. The Alphabet-owned video company said it sold out its sponsorship inventory in just two weeks, with brands including Verizon buying in.
Meanwhile, YouTube deployed a savvy promotional model not unlike the ones used by broadcast networks for decades, for which they’d use high levels of NFL viewership to promote their primetime lineups. YouTube shrewdly used Friday’s event to showcase its creator talents, at one point juxtaposing uber-creator MrBeast in a recorded comedy skit co-starring NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, in which MrBeast buys the league.
YouTube also received solid marks for its live stream — which, rivals including Netflix would likely testify, can be a perilous endeavor.
Posting on LinkedIn mid-game that YouTube’s live stream was “looking good,” analyst Dan Rayburn noted, “The game appeared on the home page at 7pm and is easy to find. YouTube has done a lot to optimize the bitrates, is doing ABR server-side (what they call SABR), is utilizing VP9 and AV1 and is doing manifestless protocol delivery.”
Last year for Week 1, NBCUniversal’s Peacock controlled rights to the São Paulo game featuring the eventual Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles defeating the Green Bay Packers 34-29. That game averaged 14.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen. But the metrics are viewed as being apples and oranges, with Nielsen deploying its new “Big Data + Panel” just last week.
YouTube’s live stream game came just under 10 years after Yahoo conducted the NFL’s first ever live-streamed regular-season game, an October 2015 contest between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars from London’s Wembley Stadium.
Certainly, a lot has happened to the video business over the last decade.
This will be the first campaign in which every regular-season game is available outside the pay TV ecosystem. Ironically, a handful of games aren’t available to traditional pay TV subscribers — including Thursday Night Football contests on Amazon Prime Video.