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NFL, Yahoo! to offer audio Webcasts
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(IDG) -- Sunday night football is coming to the Net -- sort of.
Starting Sunday, October 8, Yahoo! and the National Football League will offer live audio Webcasts of games for free for the first time ever. The Webcasts will be available at NFL.com, on team Web sites and at Yahoo! Sports. Fans also will be able to tap into a co-branded real-time stat feature online, under an agreement between Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo! and the NFL that was announced Tuesday. NFL and Yahoo! officials declined to disclose financial details or to say how long the agreement will last.
The audience is expected to include displaced fans who want to hear local broadcasts, as well as television spectators who want to track statistics online while watching a game, officials said in a briefing Tuesday.
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The deal follows similar agreements Yahoo! has reached with the nation's professional basketball and baseball leagues to offer expanded content, on-demand audio feeds and real-time stats online. But it is a marked departure from the Olympics' blackout of both audio Webcasts and video highlights, whether live or delayed.
Like the International Olympic Committee, the NFL maintains a strict blackout of video Webcasts in order to protect its lucrative television deals. "That's the golden egg for us," acknowledged Tom Spock, the NFL's executive VP of new media. Chris Russo, senior VP of new media, added that the Internet is clearly a complement to television, not a replacement.
Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang, meanwhile, criticized the Olympics' decision to forbid Webcasting, especially given the Games' disappointing television ratings. In the case of the NFL, he expressed hope that the audio-Webcasting deal leads to "greater things."
For the NFL, the Yahoo! deal is the latest in a string of new-media efforts. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said he became interested in Yahoo! after the last Super Bowl, when he discovered that its sports site boasted information he couldn't find on NFL.com. The league has also joined forces with eBay to add an auction feature to NFL.com.
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