Neal Mohan, the chief executive of YouTube, spends most fall Sundays lounging in his family room with four National Football League games playing across a 90-inch screen. But when the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers play on Friday night, the self-proclaimed sports nut plans to be standing and pacing nervously.
The game is a major test of Mr. Mohan’s strategy for turning YouTube into the epicenter of home entertainment. In May, he agreed to pay the N.F.L. an estimated $100 million for the rights to broadcast the live game worldwide for the first time on YouTube. The game has the potential to set records for the largest streaming audience — or be remembered as the latest misfire, as sports programming migrates from traditional television to streaming services.
The outcome rests on a simple question: Can YouTube do live sports?
“It’s not trivial to pull this off,” Mr. Mohan, 52, said in an interview last month. A smooth broadcast of the game’s digital data, known as bits, would most likely be forgotten, he said, but the smallest glitch could mar the event.
That’s why he plans to be standing and walking around during the game, he said: “I’ll be pacing nervously to be sure those bits show up.”
Whatever happens will help determine the future of sports broadcasts for fans, leagues and YouTube. Over the past two years, Amazon, Netflix and Apple have spent billions of dollars to acquire the rights to broadcast live sports as they battle traditional media companies for customers.
But the push by tech companies into the arena has been tainted by mishaps. Last year, the first N.F.L. broadcast by Netflix began with audio issues, and commercials bled into some game-day commentary. Amazon, which airs “Thursday Night Football” games for the N.F.L., has faced complaints about buffering and audio out of sync with the picture.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the latest tech platform to want a piece of the action. It jumped into the sports rights business with a $14 billion, seven-year deal in 2022 for Sunday Ticket, which shows out-of-market Sunday games unavailable on local television stations. Friday’s game is the first time it will be the sole broadcaster of a major U.S. sporting event.
The programming has helped increase the number of hours people spend watching YouTube on television rather than on mobile devices. Sports, which account for 40 billion hours of viewership annually, are playing a prominent role in furthering that trend and lifting YouTube’s business.
Commercial spots during the Los Angeles-Kansas City game will cost about $30 for every 1,000 viewers, more than double what YouTube typically gets, said Mary Ellen Coe, the company’s chief business officer. Subscriptions to YouTube TV, which offers traditional network and cable channels for a fee, increased to 9.5 million this year, up from five million in 2022 before it signed the Sunday Ticket deal, according to MoffettNathanson, a research firm.
YouTube has pulled together a list of the sports programming that will be sold over the next decade and identified what rights it wants to pursue, Ms. Coe said. The list includes some events that could be broadcast around the world and others that would be shown only in select countries like India and Japan.
“We’re a very natural home to a very large base of sports fans,” Ms. Coe said, adding that “it’s a very easy funnel to convert” those fans into viewers.
Acquiring more sports rights is not guaranteed. Though YouTube has deep pockets, being the home of user-generated content is not a traditional fit for sports leagues. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball are more accustomed to having their games appear alongside sitcoms and dramas than dogs on skateboards.
Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, said Friday’s N.F.L. game had the potential to validate YouTube — much as football validated Fox in the 1990s, when it was an upstart network and home to sitcoms like “Married … With Children.”
“YouTube is like the Library of Congress when it comes to video,” Mr. Nathanson said. “Is this their grand entrance onto the world stage of premium content?”
YouTube has tried to sell itself as a way to draw younger fans to football. When it pitched the N.F.L. this year on broadcasting Friday night’s game, it proposed putting YouTube creators with young fan bases on the field as sideline reporters. It also suggested offering alternate feeds of the game hosted by creators.
The pitch appealed to the N.F.L., which is eager to attract new viewers. Last year, more than half of the league’s viewers were older than 55, while fewer than 5 percent were between 18 and 24 years old, according to S&P Global, a research firm.
After landing rights to the game this spring, YouTube tapped its biggest star, MrBeast, who has more than 400 million subscribers, to film a promotional video for the game. It also asked the creator Deestroying, who played college football, to be a sideline reporter and enlisted four other creators, including iShowSpeed, to host separate livestreams.
“I’m not interested in taking the same product and just putting it on YouTube and slapping a YouTube logo on it,” Mr. Mohan said. He said he wanted the game to be done “in a way that was really special in terms of bringing YouTube magic to the sports experience.”
Other leagues that YouTube wants to buy rights from will be watching. Last year, when Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, aired the N.F.L.’s first regular-season Friday night game from Brazil, it drew 14 million viewers and few complaints about technical issues.
Viewership might be helped by the matchup. The game will be the first time the Kansas City Chiefs are playing since Travis Kelce, the team’s star tight end, announced his engagement to Taylor Swift. Mr. Mohan said he was hoping Ms. Swift would make an appearance at the game, which is again being played in São Paulo, Brazil.
To avoid technical problems, the streaming platform has prepared for months. It hired NBC to produce the broadcast and has refined a system to convert the broadcast into a livestream that arrives at the proper resolution on every device, from smartphones to TVs.
While YouTube has perfected the art of streaming, the bulk of the time it is feeding people an array of specific videos at different times. The challenge here will be managing a stampede of traffic for a single event from millions of viewers hanging on every second of the action.
Last month, YouTube and N.F.L. executives were alarmed when a glitch occurred during the livestream of a “New Heights” podcast featuring Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce, which set the Guinness World Record for most concurrent views. YouTube engineers quickly determined that the problem stemmed from how the podcast was produced, not from the platform.
Mr. Mohan, who heard about the glitch later, said he was confident enough in his engineering team that he planned to watch the game from home rather than from a “war room” at YouTube’s offices in Los Angeles.
“I would only be a distraction,” he said.
Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis.
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