NFL Risks Falling Behind to Other Sports on the Internet

The NFL has done its best to embrace the digital age. It can do better.

The world’s most powerful entertainment company (you heard me) has struggled to climb on the world wide horse, but it has. The league’s web portal now offers credible commentary about its 32 member teams and enormous options for written and video content. The site even offers fantasy football games, the subject of more than one lawsuit involving the league’s players back in the day.

That’s not enough.

The NFL has embraced social media...sort of. Its front office PR people have figured out how to use Twitter to disseminate rehearsed messaging and news about the league, and yeah, some of it is interesting to the average fan. Guys like Greg Aiello and Brian McCarthy apparently are permitted to exhibit some personality, and do so.

That’s not enough.

The league has even eased (to some extent) its maniacal crackdown on pirated video. Back in the dark ages of 2008, if a homemade video of an NFL highlight was viewable on YouTube on Monday morning, it was pulled by Monday afternoon. It’s not so bad now, and in fact the league produces embeddable video highlight packages made available to certain web outlets, including this one.

That’s not enough, either.

The NFL needs to make more of its games available online. And I’m talking entire games. Games from last week. Games from the 1970s. The first NFL game ever filmed. All of them, in all of their raw glory, from celluloid to Technicolor to 1080p.

I want to thumb through the history of the NFL at my own pace. I want to watch Len Dawson win Super Bowl IV, and then watch Derrick Thomas  

Let’s be fair here: the league does offer streaming TV replays in an online, on-demand package called “Game Rewind.” It’s a bit pricey for the average fan, but reviews have been positive. Most people don’t know about it, or don’t care, since they don’t want to pay for a game that they may have already watched.

Why can’t the league bring us one NFL game per week, online, for free? I don’t even care if it’s on Thursday at noon. It wouldn’t be a bad way for the NFL to jump on the weekday sports bandwagon. The NCAA tournament, the World Cup (men’s and women’s) and Cubs baseball all benefit from people in front of their computers, bored at work. I hate watching the Jacksonville Jaguars on my TV on Monday night. I would jump at the chance to watch them on Wednesday morning in a cubicle.

The reason they haven’t done this is obvious: money. Television networks are paying obscene amounts of money to broadcast the league’s games. How upset would they be if the league just started giving them away? And surely the NBCs and ESPNs of the world fought valiantly against the online content the league has already produced. The incentive to expand digitally, in terms of pure dollars and cents, isn’t there for the NFL’s business.

Other sports leagues have done a better job of jumping on the digital bandwagon. Baseball and hockey stream their games live online or through wireless apps available for purchase. And thanks to college football’s not-at-all incestuous relationship with college football, one can watch an archive of older college games on ESPN3.

The NFL isn’t the only outfit that can’t see an opportunity to grow its business. Eastman-Kodak treated digital photography like a fad, and by the time it realized that people weren’t getting film developed anymore, it was too late. Ford spent most of the 1980s producing cars that the average American didn’t want until the foreign manufacturers buried them in their own red ink.

You and I have grown up on football. Our kids, with their self-indulgent dispositions, their iPhone 7s and their inability to sit still for more than three hours, might find other things to do.

The league should not only be implementing channels for fans to digitally consume its games. It should be leading the way.

The NFL’s product, for all of its efforts in merchandising, expansive highlight show packaging and original programming, hasn’t changed. They want you sitting on your ass in front of your TV every Sunday afternoon from September to January. And they seem quite content to leave those who want it another way on the vine.

That’s not how elite organizations operate.