After Verizon fumbled its mobile streaming rights with the NFL, both ESPN and NBC have wasted no time in taking advantage of a new opportunity. ESPN and NBC have separately announced that they will stream their respective weekly shows, Monday Night Football and Sunday Night Football, on smartphones beginning with the 2018 NFL season.
Of course, to take advantage of this, you will need to be a pay TV customer. Authentication will be required in order to take advantage of this. Both companies are offering streams to connected TVs, PCs, and tablets, but at the same time, phones have never been able to get streaming. This is not a factor anymore because Verizon’s previous deal with the NFL exclusively brought those rights to Verizon’s own customers.
Verizon last week announced a new deal with the league that amounted to $2 billion, but it wiped out the exclusivity clause. Verizon managed to pick up live-streaming rights to the entire NFL season and postseason schedule on multiple platforms. Due to this new agreement, this gave opportunity to both ESPN and NBC to swoop in and take advantage.
ESPN said that it’s newly-acquired rights are good until the end of 2021 season. For the NBC agreement, it “allows for NBCU to extend those authenticated streaming rights to its cable, satellite, and telco partners, as well as virtual MVPDs” like Sling TV, Hulu, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, and DirecTV Now.
