This week, the NLL announced their latest attempt at a streaming platform. It’s called NLL+ (similar to Paramount+ and Disney+) and it is a new free service that will provide lots of video content including game replays, highlights, and other video features like interviews and such. Live games will be also available in some areas though significantly, not in the US. Let’s have a look at this new service and what it might be used for. Is this really a big deal?

Back in the late stages of the 2016 NLL season, the league introduced a thing called NLLTV. I don’t remember much about it, but I did write in my 2017 wish list that I was impressed with it:

The feeds were solid, the picture and sound were great, and the games were (mostly) easy to find. The ability to rewind and fast forward the stream, go back 10 seconds with a single button click, play in slow-motion, and then rejoin the game live are invaluable. Best of all, you can watch games after the fact: the next day, a week later, or whatever.

I only found a couple of mentions of NLLTV in my 2017 and 2018 articles. None had anything bad to say about it, but there was no mention of it after about January 2018.

I had a look today at plus.nll.com, and it looks similar to what I remember from NLLTV. The controls look basically like YouTube, with a play/pause button, mute, full-screen, go back 10 seconds, go forward 10 seconds, and a slider to go anywhere in the stream. There’s no image shown while you move the slider, which would be helpful, but that could come later. I don’t see a slow motion option either but that’s definitely on the “nice to have but not required” list. Obviously the video I’m watching is not live so I assume there will be a “rejoin live feed” button if you rewind a live game. And since very few people are likely watching 2024 NLL Finals highlights right now, it’s hard to gauge how it will scale when thousands of people are watching at the same time.

(Suggestion to the NLL+ folks: if I’m already signed in, don’t show the big “Sign up today!” banner.)

In the US, you still have to use (and pay for) ESPN+ to watch games live, so this is less of a big deal for Americans. In Canada, NLL+ will show all games live except those on the TSN linear channels. Outside Canada and the US, all NLL games will be streamed on NLL+. This means that we Canadians can cancel our TSN+ subscription (unless you use it for something other than lacrosse, which I don’t), so this will save me about $8 per month.

One drawback, at least for now, is that there is no mobile app or app for smart TVs. Logging in on your phone and watching that way is not a big deal, but to watch it on a TV, you’d have to use Chromecast or something similar, or log into NLL+ on the browser on your TV, which is generally inconvenient.

Back in 2017, streaming wasn’t exactly a new thing but the choices were far more limited than we have now. Obviously there was YouTube and a few other services for uploading your own videos, and there was Netflix and Hulu and probably a few others. But no Disney+, no Crave, no Peacock, no Apple TV, and so on. The NLL tried to get into that field but it only lasted a year or two. But now, there are zillions of streaming services out there. I’m sure there are dozens of companies who provide those services. You give them a URL, a design of how you want the videos indexed, and the videos you want posted, and they set up the site for you, and give you instructions on how to stream something live. Creating such a site is now a solved problem. That’s not to say it will be flawless from day one, but much of it is likely a template which has been tested a lot with other sites so it should be pretty solid.

There’s another thing that may be included in NLL+: stats. It’s possible that not many people noticed this, but in an article on Sports Business Journal describing NLL+, it says that there will be content from “Champion Data for schedule and data feeds”. Champion Data is the stats provider that the NLL uses, and that’s where I download the game sheets which I use to populate nllstats.com. It’s possible that the NLL will be moving their stats pages to NLL+ and maybe even expanding or enhancing them. That doesn’t mean that nllstats.com is going away or anything but in my opinion, the more stats that are available, the better.

The best part of this is that it will be FREE. Teddy Jenner on the Off the Crossebar podcast said that it will also be free next year, which is great. I imagine the league will want to monetize this platform at some point, but I love the fact that the league decided that soaking the cost for at least two years is worth it for the ability to get more people watching.

As others have said on social media, the possibilities for this platform are huge. In addition to games and interviews and other special features like that, we could see the draft streamed live here every year, the annual awards presentation, and Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. Maybe the commissioner could give an annual “State of the League” speech. In previous years, some teams have had “town hall” meetings, where fans can gather for Q&A with players, coaches, and executives of their favourite teams — those could be streamed here as well. Pre-game and post-game analysis shows – wait, they could bring back ReLax! That alone would be worth the cost!

So in conclusion, yes, I think this is a big deal. Back in the NLL-on-YouTube days, I could post a link to the page where the replay of the game was, even supplying a time index so if you clicked on the link, it would take you directly to the game-winning goal, or the awesome save, or the controversial “should this have been a penalty?” hit. Once the games were on TSN+, replays kind of vanished. Many of the games were posted by the NLL on Facebook a few days later, but they were hard to find and not all of them were posted. Now you can point your friends at a single site for all live games and replays, and they can watch them for free. That’s growing the game.