Verizon Strikes New Live Game Streaming Deal With NFL

and they wonder why consumers pirate?

Yep, you got it right there.

Give the people what they want and at a fair price and they'll have no need to pirate.

Right now you can't even get NFL games unless you want to get DirecTV and subscribe to NFL Sunday ticket for a cost of over $1000 a year. (Cheapest DirecTV package+ NFL sunday ticket.) It's insane. I like football... but not THAT much!

It's clear to me that NFL games should be available to all operators and via the Internet. Even if it's a PPV type option. Of course they'll probably decide some insane amount like $50 per game is reasonable.

Oh well....

Or you just goto a bar that carries em all.

Most NFL games appear on pirate streaming sites. It's hard to beat free. And does it really matter that you need to pay to watch an out of market game, when the game is broadcast for free over the air.

This is the issue right here. streaming rights for sports are a disorganized mess of exclusives and at times draconian restrictions.

Take for example Baseball, if your local talk radio station has an internet stream. That same stream cannot carry the baseball game even though the station has broadcast rights to the game.

eat them caps up kids.

Netflix says 600kb/s is appropriate bandwidth for 1080p video.

Verizon's caps are 300mb, 1gb, 2gb, 4gb, 6gb, 8gb, 10gb... right?

So if you pay $90 a month (lol) for basic service, watching a full NFL game will cost how many thousands of dollars?

That, in addition to whatever fee they charge for this exclusive content. It will be interesting to see if they make this content available only on their LTE network and exclude wifi. I think that would really hurt them.

Probably won't cost thousands of dollars...

Rate
600kbps = .6Mbps

Duration
3600s/hr * 3hr/game = 10,800 seconds

So, you would have .6 megabits incoming for 10,800 seconds. But those are bits, not bytes.

So the math is .6Mbps * 10,8000 seconds / 8 for bit to byte conversion =
810MB of consumption

They go up to 50 gigs on the family plan..

for $375 a month not counting the device fees.

The family plan goes up to 50 gigs, but it isn't cheap..

Netflix doesn't stream at 1080p to your cell phone. I've watched various TV episodes on Netflix via my cell phone and haven't noticed any inordinate amount of data consumption. A few hundred MB at most.

Admittedly, I have unlimited data and wasn't trying to use my cell phone as a replacement for the Netflix app in my hardwired Net TV. It certainly isn't an obnoxious data hog if you use it to kill a few airport layovers or the like. I blow far more data with my Pandora streaming habit (if I'm awake the odds are good Pandora is running), usually in the neighborhood of 3-5GB/mo, depending on how much I'm on the road.

A) Netflix doesn't say that. Their 1080p streams are between 5400 kbps - 7000 kbps

B) The stream rate on a phone will depend on the phone. On Netflix the highest bitrate I can get on my 4 inch phone is 800 kbps and that's with both wi-fi and 4G. A phone with larger screen can probably stream at a higher rate. I doubt over mobile it will stream at more than 2 Mbps. Which would be about 2.7 GB for a 3 hour game

»support.netflix.com/en/node/306

5000 kbps / 8 = 625kb/s

Theoretical max. Android phones are getting close to actual 1080p.

Fine but you really need 1080p on a smartphone? Hell my 37 inch is 720p. And we're talking NFL here not Netflix. Unless they up the bitrate the max is nowhere near 5000. When they stream Sunday Night Football it maxes out at 3500 kbps on a PC. It's probably less on a phone.

Thats a joke but for netflix whose encodes are bitstarved anyway... whatever

It Sickens Me On How Much Money The NFL Is Bringing In.

It will be a paid app from Verizon and the streaming most likely will not be applied against the caps. And no info on what Verizon will charge for this premium service.

of course it won't count against the caps. why would it? oh, that's right. more money to be made.

It's a paid app NOW and it counts against the cap.

Fios is in a better setup to add NFL ST down the road unlike other cable systems.

Fios is starting the move to MPEG4 now.

Glad I have unlimited and don't like football!

I have a strong feeling this will be announced as not being subjected to data limits and will be a subscription service only.

Why would anyone want to watch a football game on a tiny cell phone screen???? What are you going to do with commercials?
Verizon + NFL + Mobile = KA-CHING!!!

Mobile? Out and about? At work? On the train? At the airport and no desire to pull out your laptop?

I could think of a few reasons...

Its called HDMI out.....

except you can't use HDMI out with this app. Just like you can't do HDMI out with HBOGo on a smartphone either.

Quite the contrary. You can indeed now use HDMI out with HBO GO.

Doesn't matter since the NFL app currently doesn't allow HDMI out and with it's instance on being for smartphones only I don't see that changing anytime soon.

This would work better on sprint Becuse they have unlimited data.

But at less than 100k per sec sustained downstream, it would buffer like a SOB and be unwatchable.. You can't watch a live stream on Sprint's dial up downstream speed.

No they have "unlimited" data. Sprint had the NFL before the NFL went Verizon because Verizon has 50% more customers. And Sprint doesn't have 4G everywhere. Hell Sprint doesn't have basic service everywhere. The NFL went with a company that reaches 95% of the US, not one that only reaches 65% of the US.

Assuming that they don't restrict this to prevent connecting to see the video via wi-fi, I wonder whether PlayTo would work to display the video on a TV via a Roku box.

I have less than zero interest in this so I honestly do not care though I realize a lot of people do. However, Verizon subscribers might just get ready to bend over and start paying since the money for this contract has to come from somewhere and just like cable and satellite subscribers who are getting hit up for expensive sports programming they are not interested in, it looks like Verizon may be the first cell carrier to start with the same thing in the cell phone world. I just hope this does not take off as soon we will be seeing $10 below the line charges for sports channels we never watch.

Much to Karl's chagrin, Verizon is actually competent enough to exempt these streams from the data cap, and no doubt, that will be part of the deal.

They'll recapture the money by charging data.

Too bad I couldn't get it on my iPad that is activated on my monthly ShareEverything plan.

It would be nice to get those Packers games, although I am a bigger fan of baseball and the Chicago Cubs.

Wrong. If one is dumb enough to incur an overage I guess they deserve to pay it. No one is going over, no one is buying extra data. This product will be used by those on unlimited data plans or people using wi-fi.

As the networks retain the rights to stream to tablets, it appears this new Verizon Wireless will only be accessible via smartphones. Being forced to use a Verizon LTE data connection with $15 per overages could make games expensive for users, but that's probably the entire point.

A) No the point is the NETWORKS want to retain the right to stream to tablet as is stated in the article. Trust me Verizon would LOVE to be able to stream to tablets. Especially if the conspiracy theory being proposed is that Verizon is looking to make money on data overages.

B) It's called wi-fi.

C) $15 overages apply to Share Everything plans which 2/3 of Verizon customers are NOT on. For them it's $10 per GB over. Still high, but at least get the facts correct. Also of the 2/3 not on a Share Everything plan 30-40% of those are on unlimited data plans where overage don't even apply. These number could have all been gathered before writing the article, but I guess putting out the worst case scenario that would apply to small minority of customers makes for better reading.

No one will use it after they get their first bill and Verizon will lose a fortune. Good. Screw them and the NFL.. It just gets tiring. A massive consumer revolt is coming... People are getting pretty tired of being screwed everywhere for everything. Honestly can the NFL cut a worse deal than this?

No there won't be a revolt and no people are NOT tired. If they were you wouldn't just have a trickle of people getting rid of pay TV for OTA and streaming. If people were tired of Verizon's supposedly overpriced plans Verizon wouldn't have just a 1% churn rate which is lowest of all 4 major carriers and they wouldn't continue to get more customers per quarter than the other 3 COMBINED.

People will be tired when they stop complaining on the internet and take action. Until then it's all talk. People don't have the guts to do without their Honey Boo Boo for a year to send the pay TV guys a message. People don't have the guts to dump the fancy smartphones to go back to a basic phone or go to a MVNO or just do without a cell phone all together for a year to send the mobile companies a message. Everyone wants something done no one is willing to sacrifice to make it happen. So really they should just be quiet and stop complaining. Shit or get off the pot as the saying goes.

If this could be done on tablets, I’d consider using this instead of the streaming capabilities of NFL Sunday Ticket Max. Last season, on a few Sundays when I unfortunately couldn’t be in front of the TV, I would just tether my phone to my tablet and stream NFL ST. And not sure how or why this worked, or why I ever attempted this, but when streaming through my tablet, I could also stream my lowly Bills, which I shouldn’t have been able to do, and even better, I could stream the game when they were blacked out locally, resulting in me watching them [lose] in my better picture quality as opposed to the pirate streaming sites.
One thing I’m curious about is how blackout restrictions will be enforced. Will it be based on your Verizon billing address, or will it be done via GPS. Hopefully via GPS, as spoofer apps will let your circumvent blackout rules.

Another thing that comes to mind with this being restricted to Verizon LTE only, I wonder if there are apps available that will force the phone to think it’s on LTE when it’s really not and is on wifi instead. I did the exact opposite with AT&T and the iPhone way back when. I ran a jailbroken app that made the phone think it was connected to wifi when it was in fact on 3G to get around the 10MB download limit and to get the higher quality streaming out of YouTube. The guys at XDA should have a field day with this app.

The only reason people put up with DirectTV's outrageous fees and horrible contract terms is because of the NFL Sunday ticket.