Twitter Nabs Deal With NFL To Stream Thursday Night Football
The social media network, Twitter, has outbid other big players such as Amazon and Facebook and landed the deal with the National Football League to livestream all Thursday night football games via Periscope, the company's streaming service. According to a report in USA Today, the company paid less than $10 million for the package which includes 10 games. Twitter however has some control over the advertising for the games, according to the company's COO Adam Bain.
The USA Today report noted that this new deal with the NFL is expected to boost Twitter's and Periscope's advertising revenues, and it also hopes to bring more users of the company's services. Twitter however has a much smaller user base than Facebook and Instagram which one analyst may mean better media exposure for the company but may not bring in that much revenue, as cited in the report.
A CNBC report, on the other hand, said that NFL had no choice but to go with Twitter after it got into a disagreement with their first choice, Facebook. According to the report, the League felt that their content was "undervalued" by Facebook and that Facebook Live's platform was not prime for getting revenue from livestreaming, unlike that of Twitter.
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As part of the deal, Twitter users will be able to watch the Thursday night games live (all ten games of the League's regular season), including pre-game interviews and in-game highlights through Periscope and this will be for free, according to The Guardian. The other six games will be available via NBC and CBS. Only Verizon has the mobile rights to stream all 16 games, for a fee.
For the NFL, it is a clear move to "cross the generational divide to reach younger fans and other households who don't own television and mostly watch sports on the Internet while boosting revenue by selling streaming rights to games separately."
