Today CBS announced that it will live stream its coverage of the American Football Conference’s playoffs online. If you are a football fan without a television, this is good news.
According to CBS, the championship game for the conference, two “divisional round games” and a wildcard game will be streamed. The content will be centered, unsurprisingly, at CBS Sports’ website.
Broadcast rights for large sports leagues are expensive, leaving rights holders in a constant revenue maximization trap. To have decided to expand its live streaming of games, CBS appears to be betting that larger audiences are the path to more revenue, regardless of what platform they choose to view the games on.
If you were curious, the American Football Conference’s sixteen teams are half of the NFL. The National Football Conference contains the other sixteen. Each league has its own playoffs and championship. The Super Bowl is the competition between the winner of each league.
CBS also streamed the last Super Bowl online. Given that it is expanding those efforts, the Super Bowl experiment was presumably a success. If current trends hold for the next few seasons, we might see full seasons streamed online before the end of the decade.
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