Why the NFL won’t let you watch the Super Bowl online.

A month ago I found myself in Baltimore, heading back to New York by bus on the final day of the NFL’s regular season. Come 4 p.m., my tortured and torturous Jets were playing the Dolphins, possibly for a chance to go to the postseason. But, as is the case every Sunday, I had nowhere to watch them play. I am a man without a TV.

In between calls to friends to see if I could loiter on their couch come game time, another traveler leaned over and said I should find a sports bar. But for me, sitting in a sports bar alone on a Sunday afternoon is akin to celebrating New Year’s on a cruise—why do I want to celebrate (or, in the Jets’ case, mourn) with 3,000 strangers stranded at sea? My fellow traveler then suggested I stream the game online, via a user-generated live TV site. This intrigued me—I’m much more comfortable mourning with 300 strangers in the solitude of my living room.

Except it wasn’t 300 people I was watching with. It was 7,000. And there were multiple other streams going on, all with thousands of additional viewers. By now, finding thousands of people partaking in some obscure corner of the Internet is akin to lifting a log and finding a whole ecosystem scurrying underneath. Once you discover the surprise, the intriguing becomes the mundane.

The biggest surprise here was that so many people were partaking in an experience that was so alarmingly bad. There were multiple feeds on the two main streaming sites, UStream and Justin.tv, and nearly all of them had visuals so splotchy I could barely tell the difference between the Jets’ uniforms and the field—and that’s when I had stretched it only far enough to fill a quarter of my screen. Some streamers had pointed a webcam at their TV and then visibly kicked up their feet to watch the game. Others flipped channels during the commercial, without any note to the audience informing them whether we’d ever return to the Jets game. On several feeds there was no sound, forcing me to turn on the radio and hope the AM signal wasn’t running too far ahead of my broadband. The ultimate indignity, though, was the chat room running to the right of the feed. Unfortunately, I didn’t save any direct quotes, but suffice to say it was even less enlightening than listening to Tim McCarver talk shop with John Kruk.

This sad muck has burbled up only because of a hole in the streaming market. Domestically, the NFL streams only Sunday Night Football (more on this in a bit), which means that more than a dozen games are unavailable online every week. UStream and Justin.tv have filled the void, providing an unofficial product that official authorities can’t provide themselves.

I write can’t rather than won’t because the NFL’s hands are more or less tied. When they agreed to extend their contracts in 2004, there was little to no talk about how the league and networks would handle digital streaming. The same thing happened when they negotiated in 2005 to move Monday Night Football to ESPN. Brian Rolapp, the head of NFL.com’s digital-media arm, told The Big Money that when the contracts were initially negotiated, Web video wasn’t even a glimmer on the horizon. Plus, CBS was still operating NFL.com (in exchange for a fee), so the league wasn’t well-positioned to start streaming games. Thus, the contracts got signed, and the NFL didn’t have any rights to air the games live online.