Twitter wins rights to stream NFL's slate of Thursday Night Football games
Neil Hughes
In a major push into the content business, Twitter has won the rights to the National Football League's Thursday Night Football, and will stream 10 games online for free starting next season.
Twitter's live online streams will be available alongside broadcasts from NBC, CBS and the NFL Network, the league announced on Tuesday. Twitter is believed to have outbid the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Verizon and Yahoo to win the NFL deal.
Apple was originally rumored to be interested in bidding on the Thursday Night Football slate of games, but ultimately declined to make an offer. Reports indicated that Apple felt the streaming deal was not worth the league's asking price.
Live sports are often cited as propping up traditional cable subscriptions, though those events are increasingly available through the internet. And the NFL's deal with Twitter could be seen as a blow to U.S. cable operators.
The big four American sports leagues — MLB, the NHL, the NBA, and the NFL — now make most or all of their games available for streaming. Those solutions are not ideal, however, as fans must pay for the privilege and work around local blackout restrictions.
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11 Comments
Ads. Ads. Ads. Ads.
Just another Ad serving platform. I don't partake.
So they going to tweet out the games.
First I didn't realize that tweeter can stream video, did not know Periscope was that capable.
This is desperate attempt on Tweeter part to be relavent again and trying to drive the stock up. I think NFL will make money but Tweeter will lose.
A little late for April Fools' Day, isn't it?
Here is more of the details
A Re/code report states Twitter paid less than $10M for the rights to stream 10 of next year's 16 Thursday night NFL games, a tiny fraction of the $450M CBS (NYSE:CBS) and NBC (NASDAQ:CMCSA) paid for Thursday broadcast rights.
NBC and CBS also have streaming rights as well, I think this is just an experiment with tweeter to see what happens, and really Apple did not think $10M was too much to stream the video on Apple TV. I think it was the issue that the NFL control everything and they are not sharing the ad revenues equality and there is no competition so they do not have to let anyone play in their sand box. Apple would be a larger threat to the status quo than Tweeter is in this case.