Going to be away from home on Super Bowl Sunday this year? No need to miss the game. According to the Associated Press, for the very first time, the NFL is going to be streaming NBC’s broadcast of the Super Bowl on the network’s website as well as on NFL.com, plus it will be available on your smartphone via Verizon’s NFL Mobile app.
You can also catch Wild Card Saturday online and, if you have absolutely nothing else to do, the Pro Bowl. Although most people will probably be piling into Buffalo wing- and beer-filled Super Bowl parties, it’s nice to see media companies filling one of the biggest holes in online content: live sports.
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For all the people who watch shows on Hulu and Netflix instead of paying for hundreds of cable channels they don’t use, watching live sports is still incredibly difficult, often limited to cricket matches and football games between colleges nobody has ever heard of on WatchESPN.
The turning point for live sports content will come when middle-of-the-road games start getting streamed, instead of only the games that are so unpopular nobody is watching anyway or so incredibly popular that everybody is watching and the networks aren’t worried about losing viewership. My guess is that’ll happen about the same time HBO shows like Game of Thrones are available to stream on Netflix (that time being anywhere from “not soon enough” to “never”).