The National Football League will distribute about 100 clips a week on Twitter, including highlights and instant replays – about twice the content the NFL distributed in its previous deal with the social network.
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Twitter and the NFL are not strangers to one another, with the two having worked together since 2013 on Twitter Amplify, which made video more accessible on Twitter timelines.
Gotcha! If you are also a Re/code reader who cares about the way ads are bought and sold, you may also want to note that in this deal Twitter will sell ads directly against the NFL’s content, and share revenue from those sales.
“Furthermore, the NFL and Twitter will continue to collaborate on new discovery features and user experiences to broaden access of NFL content to millions of fans”, the league said in a press release this morning. It’s a way of getting more info out to the masses and more users on Twitter. “Project Lightning,” expected this fall, will focus on big events and gather real-time stories, photos, videos and conversation and in the US there’s nothing quite as big as NFL games.
With the deal, Twitter said it plans to roll out more football content this season such as ingame highlights from pre-season through Super Bowl 50, breaking news and analysis, best plays, custom game recaps, fun infographics, behind-the-scenes content, and archive videos. Nielsen reports that the 2014 NFL season reached 202.3 million unique viewers and 80 percent of all homes with televisions.
As noted today by Re/code, Twitter is nearly certainly planning to use the extra content in its upcoming live-events product. The deal is the first multiyear partnership that Twitter has forged with a major media company.
Separately on Monday, Twitter co-founder and interim CEO Jack Dorsey disclosed he has bumped up his investment in Twitter, stoking speculation that the 38-year-old tech tycoon will become the floundering company’s permanent CEO.
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Both of these pieces of news have had a positive effect on Twitter’s stock, which is now up 4.63%, or $1.25, to $28.27 a share.
