ESPN picks up the rights to stream Monday Night Football over mobile phones

ESPN has made a deal with the NFL that will allow it to stream Monday Night Football over mobile phones. Currently, the sports network has the rights to stream the weekly prime-time Monday contests on tablets and other mobile devices. The new pact starts with the upcoming NFL Wild Card weekend (Jan. 6-7) and Pro Bowl (Jan. 29), and runs through the end of the 2021 NFL season. According to the Disney-owned sports network, besides Monday Night Football, it will stream NFL highlights over smartphones to its subscribers. This is in addition to ESPN's live studio shows that are based on the NFL such as Sunday NFL Countdown and Monday Night Connection.

ESPN is the most popular digital platform in the world for sports with 117 million monthly visitors. That is more than the combined total of visitors to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th most popular digital sports properties. The ESPN app is the most popular sports app in the world. Streaming content provided by ESPN is seen on 9.6 million unique devices each month, streaming for 2.1 billion minutes. On a year-over-year basis, that is a gain of 18% and 33% respectively.

Now that it will own the mobile phone rights to Monday Night Football, the latter will be available for authenticated streaming over ESPN's digital properties on all devices and platforms. So far this year, without the streaming mobile phone rights, ESPN has averaged 10.8 million viewers for MNF. That includes T.V., tablets and OTT devices. Assuming everything stays the same, viewership should rise once mobile phones are included in the numbers.



source: ESPN via SlashGear