Over this past fall, Yahoo paid the NFL around $20 million to live stream, in the early-morning U.S. hours, a game featuring the Jaguars and Buffalo Bills. Neither of these mid-market teams came close to making the playoffs. But the fact that Yahoo could draw an audience of around 15.2 million viewers, and sell out its ad inventory, for such a crummy game showed the potential to the NFL of what it could do by breaking off marginal contests from its existing pay-TV packages.
Source: NFL expands London game-streaming strategy, further moves beyond pay-TV ecosystem – FierceCable