Yahoo! Sports paid $20 million to have exclusive rights—outside
of Buffalo and Jacksonville markets—to stream the Bills/Jaguars extra-early
London game today. Anybody who has used Yahoo! Fantasy Sports services has had
their hearts fill with dread as the servers were down at 9:55 AM on a Sunday
Morning. I expected more of the same, given that Yahoo! also had trouble
bringing me Community earlier this year. As I type this, I’ve watched the entire football game in HD with
limited stuttering and buffering.
I live on the west coast, so this was an early game for me.
Last night I saw that you could stream the game directly from the Yahoo!
Fantasy Sports app. So I intended to test this… I’m an early riser but being up
and coherent at 6:30 AM on a Saturday was going to be a stretch. As I awoke
this morning I fumbled for my cell phone and headphones that I left on my
bedside table. I opened the app and there was a button for the game, I hit it,
fully expecting to sit and wait for it to buffer. The feed popped up
immediately, and after gaining its footing, in full HD.
After I got my act together, I switched to my computer. The
feed popped up on the Yahoo! home screen, no sign in, no nothing. It was right
there. No BS. I like to run a feed on
one half of my screen and work on the other half. Work is usually
Twitter/posting on a sports forum. This usually involves a bit of finagling the
size of the stream in the other window. Yahoo changed size immediately.
I’m watching and there is a regular commentating crew going
on, spouting the normal platitudes about who wants it more and about how a
person is a “coaches’ coach” or a “players’ player,” or other pointless
nonsense. Then I was alerted to the Fantasy stream. I like fantasy, I play
& write about fantasy, I thought it would be fun just to be something
different.
It took the game to another level. They didn’t say who they
were, but from what I could gather, it was Brad Evans and a couple of Yahoo
bloggers. Cursory research could have found me their names, but this isn’t
well-researched sports opinions. This alternative commentary track was like a
Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on the Jaguars best attempts at giving the
game away.
Whether it was repeatedly calling out Jaguars cornerback Dwayne Gratz, cheering big hits and
touchdowns or the gem “Blake Bortles gonna
do what Blake Bortles gonna do” after a Bort interception, the Fantasy audio
feed kept me glued to the game. It was early, part of me wanted to go back to
bed when the Jags were running wild on the Bills. The only thing that kept me
watching was the commentary. It took me, as a half-awake disengaged watcher to someone
actively excited to watch the game. It was incredible, like I was watching the
game with a group of friends instead of next to a sleepy feline through
headphones to not wake up my fiancée.
Overall the Yahoo! experience can only be described as a
complete success. The streaming was great, the commentary was exceptional. My
only gripe is that there wasn’t great integration of statistics on the feed
page, but that can be easily remedied.
I sincerely hope there’s more of this in the future.
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