The NFL on YouTube? League Agrees to New Partnership to Bring Classic Games Online

| May 13, 2016 | Streaming News, Top Picks | No Comments

nfl on twitter

The NFL announced this week that it is expanding its partnership with YouTube to bring more content to the streaming giant.

YouTube was at one point a haven for copyright-violating highlight videos, but the NFL, after a few years, finally started actively participating on the streaming service. The NFL YouTube channel is one of the best places to watch game highlights, interviews, top 10 lists and more. While legal live-streams of the games are probably a ways off, the NFL will now bring several classic NFL games for each team to YouTube.

As far as what games will be added through this expansion of the existing partnership, it’s still anyone’s guess. It sounds as if the NFL will hand-select a few “classics” for each team, meaning the Browns probably won’t see any games from after 1990 streaming on YouTube anytime soon. But seriously, any expansion of the NFL streaming is a win.

The NFL is starting to experiment more and more with a variety of major social networks, with several regular season games of 2016 being streamed on Twitter. Last year’s Jaguars/Bills game that streamed on Yahoo! Screen was viewed by many to be a successful venture for all involved, so we’d expect to see a considerable increase in live streaming for the US’s current most popular sport.

YouTube as well benefits from active participation from the major sports leagues. Sport-related videos are extremely popular on the service, so it would make sense for them to lobby for more submissions. No word on this deal as to how favorable the terms are for a league as big as the NFL, but considering the additional content being streamed through this new program being archive footage, the NFL doesn’t seem like it has much to lose.

Will you go back and watch these old games via YouTube? What games are you hoping the NFL picks for your team? Let us know in the comments.