New York, Aug 27: America Online said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with the National Football League to offer video and audio broadcasts online to AOL subscribers. The multiyear deal between the unit of AOL Time Warner AOL.N and the league is an expansion of an existing agreement with the NFL. AOL has offered NFL-related news and statistics since 2001.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The agreement will give AOL's high-speed Internet subscribers access to pregame video and highlights, as well as other programming packages, at no extra charge beyond the online service's monthly fee.
Video footage from live games will not be offered as part of this deal.

The deal appears to be AOL's deeper foray into sports video programming. It has signed or expanded similar high speed Internet video deals with the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League.

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Tom Richardson, vice president of AOL Sports in a telephone interview said that the new agreement with the NFL marks a "critically important" chapter in programming for AOL. "This is all an attempt to create the single best broadband sports experience for free in an integrated approach."

Such deals are also a lower-cost way to create new programming for high speed Internet subscribers. All of the NFL videos will be created by the NFL.

The news also reflects NFL's ambitions to squeeze more revenues from its valuable, century-old trove of sports programming. It has hired IBM IBM.N to digitize its entire archive of football videos.

Separately, Real Networks recently began to offer online radio broadcasts of NFL games for a monthly or seasonal fee.
Bureau Report