As more and more people cut their proverbial cords—The A.V. Club doesn’t recommend cutting actual cords, by the way, as then you’ll have to buy new cords—traditional television providers have comforted themselves in the knowledge that sports and local news will never make the jump to the internet. “We’ve got sports and local news, the bastards can’t take those from us,” we imagine a Time Warner executive mumbling as a Comcast executive wipes sweat off of his brow with a $100 bill. “Well, local news is usually terrible, but we’ll be fine as long as we have sports.”
Unfortunately for that fictional Time Warner executive, Variety is reporting that the National Football League (or “NFL”) has just signed a deal that will allow Yahoo to stream a single regular-season football game for free over the internet. This won’t just be any old NFL game, though, this will be the October 25 match between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars, a game that’s going to be held in London. The trick here is that the normal TV networks don’t really care about this game, because it’ll be happening at 9:30 in the morning here in the land of the free—and also because it involves the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars—but time is meaningless to people on the internet.
The game will be streamed on various Yahoo-branded services, including the website itself, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Screen, and even Tumblr, which will make it a lot easier to ship your favorite players. We’re working on a really touching photoshop of Richie Incognito holding hands with Matt Cassel that’s going to get reblogged like crazy. Anyway, while this particular game might not be a huge deal, it does open the door for more sports to stream on the internet in the future. Then the cord cutters will only be missing out on the local news, and they can probably handle that.