NFL’s Thursday package could break Internet
NEW Y OR K • The NFL will auction off the broadcast rights to its slate of Thursday night football games in January, and the league’s executive vice-president for media, Brian Rolapp, says it’s “theoretically possible” that a company such as Google or Apple could win exclusive rights to show the games. Big tech companies have expressed interest in pursuing such deals in the past, and this fall Yahoo licensed the rights to produce the first free, global live stream of an NFL game. A one-year deal for Thursday games might seem like a logical next step.
It isn’ t — not this year. Aside from any wariness the NFL has about undermining relationships with traditional TV distributors, the people who run the league aren’t convinced the Internet can handle live streaming on the scale of pro football.
“Can the Internet right now sustain 30 million concurrents consistently? I think there’s an open question about that,” said Rolapp.
Anything anywhere near that scale would strain the Internet. After a sporting event is shot, its next stop is a tech firm such as Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media. MLBAM compresses the signal, inserts ads, and fields incoming requests from viewers who need their credentials certified before they can start watching.
During a live event, everyone tends to show up at once, which means that a distributor like MLBAM has to arrange with a network to set aside enough capacity. Networks — such as Level 3 and Akamai — can handle a surge like that, but only on a special-occasion basis, argues Bob Bowman, MLBAM’s chief executive. “Is there enough hardware to do it one time? The answer is yes. Could you do it once a week? Difficult,” he said. “All that hardware costs money.”
Building enough capacity to put a dent in television viewing may not even be possible, said Dan Rayburn, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan: “It ’s an unworkable i dea, even down the line.”