Twitter bested Verizon and Amazon after a bidding process for the rights to live-stream 10 NFL Thursday Night Football games next season for under $10 million, a smaller bid than its competition.
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Those games will also be shown on NBC, CBS and the NFL Network at the same time they are streamed on Twitter.
The league experimented with live-streaming last season in a partnership with Yahoo. So many of our fans use Twitter during games, and that was one of the things that was important to us. said Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s EVP of media.
“There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday Night Football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season”, said Goodell.
Peter Kafka at Recode cites sources saying that Twitter only paid about US$10 million for the games, which is peanuts in comparison the US$450 million that CBS and NBC paid.
Twitter acquired Periscope for $86 million before it launched to the public early a year ago, and it has been relatively successful as a standalone unit, with more than 100 million live broadcasts created since its commencement. The NFL has streamed selected games, but this is its first season-long deal.
The deal gives Twitter a key piece of content to attract mainstream users in its quest to make its service a go-to place to react to and discuss live events. “Twitter is struggling to attract and keep users and it’s deals like streaming National Football League games that will keep Twitter in the forefront of users’ minds”. The games will appear on Twitter’s mobile and desktop apps, as well as on video game consoles that use Twitter apps, such as Microsoft’s Xbox. Twitter has grown to hundreds of millions of regular users, but user growth was flat at the end of 2015, compared to the third quarter of the year, at 320 million monthly visitors. And while TV networks are falling over themselves to hand them money, the league is now cultivating a new brand of digital players to at least compete with their traditional broadcast partners and potentially replace them.
The Bill-Jaguars game was available on TV only in the teams’ home markets, so fans in the rest of the country who wanted to see it had to watch the stream.
For those who want to watch Twitter’s live stream for free do not need to sign in. He claimed users were already discussing the game on the network, and streaming from the same network would most likely add to excitement.
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