Blue 42, Blue 42 … Tweet-Tweet!

Posted on April 7, 2016 by nfong

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No longer do you need to have cable to watch Thursday Night Football, just a Twitter account!  This past week, the NFL made a deal with Twitter to live stream Thursday Night Football games on the social platform.

“Re/Code’s Peter Kafta is also reporting that Twitter paid only $10 million for these streaming rights, beating out larger offers from other players, as high as $15 million” (Crook, 2016).  Those other players include Verizon, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook.  So why did the NFL decide to take less money and go with Twitter?

Many sources said that Facebook undervalued the NFL’s content rights and has a poor monetization model.  In addition, Facebook’s live streaming is still evolving, whereas Twitter is ready for primetime.  “Hans Schroder, senior vice president of media strategy, business development, and sales for the NFL said the NFL opted to go with Twitter, which “wasn’t the highest bidder,” because it has a unique way to drive engagement” (Castillo, 2016).

 

The NFL-Twitter streaming deal will allow for mobile audiences to access Thursday Night Football games from anywhere, and from a platform that has users express themselves in 140 characters or less.  Also, “given Twitter’s slowing growth numbers — the company has plateaued at around 300 million active users — this deal could be a huge boost for the platform” (Crook, 2016) and could potentially reach a a tough advertising demographic, millennial males (Castillo, 2016).

So will you be tuning into Twitter for Thursday Night Football?

Castillo, M. (2016 April 6). Why the NFL went to Twitter instead of Facebook.  CNBC.  Retrieved from http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/06/sources-bad-blood-between-nfl-facebook-led-to-twitter-deal.html

Crook, J. (2016 April 5).  Twitter signs deal with NFL to lifestream Thursday Night Football.  Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/05/twitter-signs-deal-with-nfl-to-live-stream-thursday-night-football/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techcrunch%2Fsocial+%28TechCrunch+%C2%BB+Social%29

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