The NFL Wants to Be “Quarterbacks of the Fan Experience”

NAB

NFL+ has just launched a new mobile application “where video is front and center of the experience,” says Michael Blanchard, director of engineering, platform at NFL Media.

article here

“During the season a big part of our user’s experience, roughly about half of their time spent is in the app watching video.”

It’s very important then that the experience is of a consistently high quality. That’s Blanchard’s job. He leads the engineering effort behind NFL.com, the league’s CTV applications, video player on mobile and web, and certain back-end services.

Speaking at the 2024 NAB Show, Blanchard detailed the choices made and actual experiences regarding video playback and real-time monitoring, with the objective of making every streaming session a touchdown for fans.

The process began more than six years ago when the NFL decided to support more streaming platforms. They used React Native, a technology that enabled them to write a single JavaScript-based code to power iOS, Android and web applications.

“So from a single source of code you can power all of those different platforms,” he said. “That’s the path that we took our independent iOS, Android and web teams and merged them all together.”

On the back of that, two years ago the NFL launched NFL+ , its direct-to-consumer product delivering live local and national games to users’ mobile and tablet devices. NFL+ also includes NFL Network and NFL RedZone linear channels.

This in turn created the need for a reliable website video player to deliver smooth video streaming experiences. Among the numerous options available, Blanchard selected THEOplayer from Theo Technologies.

“Our video player is utilized across all of our mobile applications, across NFL.com, all 32 of the club websites, and then on all of our connected TV apps. We knew we had to build an abstraction layer within our code that allowed us to manage the business logic around making sure who has access to.”

Blanchard explained how NFL is able to monitor the video streaming performance based on data and analytics fed back from THEOplayer.

“We’re able to see the performance of the encoders, and the CDNs and the client-level QA with data. That’s been something that we’ve made a lot of huge strides on over the course of the last year.”

A focus going forward is to improve the latency. Blanchard’s team is also expanding the NFL onto LG and Vizio Connected TV platforms, with others on the horizon.

“Like so many businesses, we want to focus on the things that are core to us, like creating the best football based experience. So we want to partner with folks who are the best in their particular area.

“We say we’d like to partner with folks who can focus on the blocking and tackling so we can be the quarterbacks of the overall fan experience. And a big piece of that is our cross-platform approach.”