IP Democracy: NFL Games for Expatriates

The National Football League and Yahoo have joined hands to stream the NFL’s full slate of live games online…but only for viewers overseas. The Yahoo!-powered games will be available on NFL Game Pass at a steep price of $24.99 per week or $249.99 for the entire 17-week NFL regular season.

At these prices, it’s clear the NFL is hoping to scoop up some extra cash by providing the events to die-hard fans who can’t access the games overseas. The NFL has said as much — this is a service for “avid” fans and not the mass market.

Which raises an interesting concept: does the web facilitate high-priced access to video content for narrow groups of viewers willing to pay big bucks for that access? For example, I might pay a lot of money for online access to an obscure TV show or for historical WWII footage, content not likely to draw a crowd (and therefore not likely to generate ad revenues).

Since this content already exists and putting it online is a relatively costless proposition, particularly if demand on the servers is light, why wouldn’t programmers start setting up premium portals for all kinds of content? Any subscription or access payments are just gravy.

That’s the case with what the NFL is doing — North American football appeals only to North Americans. It’s a particularly geographically narrow sport. Outside of Canada or the U.S., few people want to watch it…unless they’re North Americans.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on September 8, 2006 10:26 AM to IP Democracy