(Corrects to Adam Cahan, senior vice president of Yahoo video
from senior vice president of mobile and emerging products,
paragraph 5)
By Deborah M. Todd
SAN FRANCISCO, March 10 (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc YHOO.O has
entered into a partnership to stream live National Hockey
League broadcasts, part of its push to use sports to draw in
millennial viewers and the advertisers who want to reach them.
Starting with Friday's match between the Philadelphia Flyers
and the Tampa Bay Lightning, Yahoo will provide access to live
games that are outside a viewer's home market, game highlights
and additional content for free on the Yahoo Sports homepage and
on Tumblr.
Yahoo will stream four NHL games per week. Financial terms
of the deal were not disclosed.
Yahoo also has a separate deal with NBC Sports to stream two
additional games per week.
Adam Cahan, senior vice president of Yahoo video, said the
deal helps advertisers reach millennials, an elusive
demographic, as they are unlikely to see games on TV due to
shifting viewing habits.
The effort is also an attempt to build off of Yahoo's
first-ever global live stream in October of an NFL match played
in London. Yahoo guaranteed advertisers 3.5 million viewers for
that event and delivered around 15.2 million.
Since then, the NFL has opened up discussions with Yahoo
and several other Internet companies to live stream all three
games broadcast in London during the 2016 season.
Yahoo has used momentum from that broadcast to secure
streaming deals with Major League Baseball, the Professional
Golf Association and competitive video gaming organizations.
With the company in the process of spinning off its core
business - which includes its Web sites and email service - and
a possible sale of that business afterward, Cahan said the new
advertising streams could be helpful to that effort.
"We're excited we can bring those kinds of unique
experiences to users and can bring it at the scale Yahoo can
deliver," he said.
Neil Doshi, a managing director at Mizuho Securities, said
the deal could improve Yahoo's sale prospects with private
equity firms or organizations without sports broadcast packages,
but it doesn't guarantee a huge bump in its valuation.
"If they got FIFA, NBA or NFL, I think those would have a
little broader appeal than just hockey," he said.
(Editing by Stephen R. Trousdale and Edwina Gibbs)