US telco Verizon has announced a new deal with the NFL – i.e. American Football league – to distribute games across its digital media network.
This appears to be an attempt to answer the oft-asked question: "What's the point of dropping billions of dollars on a couple of internet dinosaurs?" Verizon, in its infinite wisdom, has focused its diversification efforts on the acquisition of AOL and Yahoo, which were kind of a big deal 20 years ago. It decided to call the digital media formed from them Oath earlier this year and has now decided to give it an injection of premium content.
As the quotes above touch upon, this deal marks the end of Verizon's exclusivity, but it will now be able to offer the games to anyone via Yahoo sports and that sort of thing. They haven't announced the numbers but reports have it between $1.5-2 billion for a five-year deal. At a time when the ROI of telco spending on premium content in coming under question this deal marks a distinct doubling down by Verizon.