As football fans go, I think I'm a pretty solid, if not fanatical follower of the Buffalo Bills. Sure, there are people that live and breathe the team more than I do, but in the great bell curve of fandom I see myself towards the end rather than being a part of the middle. I assume most folks reading this fall into the same category - if you were a casual or average fan would you be on a site appropriately called Bills Daily, reading about the Bills 5 months before the preseason and several weeks before the NFL draft (where the Bills don't even have a first round pick)? Seriously, it's a random weekday in the offseason and you're here reading this - you're a pretty big fan (I will not force you to admit that you spent hours watching the combine...the veteran player combine).

It's been years since I lived in Western New York - I suspect the same is true for many of you reading this. The Bills are what binds us together, but geographically we are everywhere. Not living in the local Bills market is tough, but the beauty of the Internet is that you can read the Buffalo News and other local papers online and can interact with fellow Bills fans on various message boards. Heck, on my commute to and from work I stream Buffalo sports radio from my phone over my car speakers - even though I live 7 hours outside of the market I feel like I'm still connected.

During the regular season you're not going keep me from watching every Bills game. My proximity to Ralph Wilson Stadium makes being a season ticket holder impractical (I know - some of you have season tickets and commute long distances to/from games - I already admitted there are more fanatical folks than me), so I have to do the next best thing - subscribe to Sunday Ticket on DirectTV.

On game days my family knows to give me my time to watch the game - I'll work like a dog to get things done during the rest of the week, but for about 3 hours on a Sunday afternoon I get time to do something about which I am passionate - cheer on the Bills.

I've been blessed in my life - I have a great family and a nice job. I have a great setup for watching the Bills on TV - a comfy couch and a 55" TV with surround sound. Often I'll throw on some glasses and watch the game in 3D - it's great, and the next best thing to being in the stadium. I can and do record the game as I watch so I can pause and rewind live action or go back and re-watch sections of the game days later. For all of this I've shelled out some decent money - not only on my home theater, but on the recurring annual subscription to Sunday Ticket. For the past few years that means shelling out about $300 to ensure I am able to see all 16 Bills games.

It may be the epitome of a first world problem and probably some of you will accuse me of whining, but I'm really unhappy with Monday's announcement that the Bills-Jaguars game in London on October 25th will only be broadcast on TV in the local Buffalo and Jacksonville markets. Outside of those markets, fans will have to watch a streaming feed of the game on the Internet via a yet to be determined "digital platform". Despite my $300, I will NOT get the game on Sunday Ticket.

Look, I'm a technology guy - I work for a huge technology company and I'm a gadget freak. In 1994 I worked for NBC on their first streaming video network. Streaming content, especially sports content, is the future and it's right for the NFL to investigate distribution of games via new avenues. Being able to watch an NFL game over a variety of devices in any location with sufficient bandwidth is awesome - it's something we as fans need.

Despite my support for digital streaming, I don't think we should be forced to watch games this way, and that's what the NFL is doing with the Bills game in London. Despite my payment for Sunday Ticket, I'm going to be watching the game on a laptop or desktop computer rather than my nice TV. I will be utterly amazed if the selected "digital platform" will be able to serve up a video feed that doesn't stutter, buffer or drop out over the 3+ hours of an NFL game. Has there ever been a big event on the Internet involving video where the system serving up the video feed was corectly sized to keep up with user demand? The video experience for a popular event is usually frustratingly terrible to the point of being unwatchable and I don't expect the world's first live streaming NFL game to be any different, even if it does start at 6:30am in California and features two small market teams. If we are lucky the NFL will acknolwledge that "some users experienced minor issues with the video feed", but they certainly aren't going to pay for the screen I put my fist through or refund any of my Sunday Ticket loot.

If I'm willing to be one of the people subsidizing the huge NFL pot of money, I expect to be treated a little bit better than I am. I should have a choice as to how I watch the game in London and $300 should buy my the right to see it in uninterrupted high definition on my TV rather than being a guinea pig for a streaming video experiment. The DirectTV contract with the NFL is the largest distribution contract the league has by far and it only works when people like me like it enough to pay some pretty serious money for it. I suspect that a good portion of people who pony up such high fees to see NFL action are people like me - fans who follow an out of market team that still want to be able to see their team play on Sunday - many of you reading this probably fall into this category.

So my plea to the NFL is this - respect me. I know I'm not a multi-million dollar sponsor of the league like a beer or car company, I'm not a guy who has a luxury box at the stadium, I'm not even a season ticket holder, but I am a guy who spends more on the NFL than most. I don't expect to be treated like a VIP, but in the grand scheme of things I am important to the NFL economy - without people like me your TV audience is comprised of people who watch for free and make large distribution contracts difficult if not impossible. If I pay for content on Sunday Ticket I expect to be able to see my games - ALL of my Sunday games - on something better than a low resolution, overmaxed video stream. Respect me as a fan that cares more than most and contributes monetarily more than most. If you take fans like me for granted you're losing some of your best, and we both deserve better than that.