Twitter wins rights to stream NFL's slate of Thursday Night Football games

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.

11 Comments

pmz 3429 comments · 15 Years

About 8 years ago

Ads. Ads. Ads. Ads.

Just another Ad serving platform. I don't partake.

maestro64 5029 comments · 19 Years

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.

robin huber 4025 comments · 22 Years

A little late for April Fools' Day, isn't it?

apple ][ 9225 comments · 13 Years

AppleInsider said:

Reports indicated that Apple felt the streaming deal was not worth the league's asking price.

Good! I've never been a fan of watching men running around, knocking each other to the ground, while trying to get a ball from one end of the field to the opposite side. There are also too many pauses in Football, and the whole thing comes off as rather boring and uneventful. Also, there seems to be quite a few wife beaters and criminal thugs in the NFL, and I'd rather not spend any time watching such characters.

And lets not even mention the horrible halftime shows that they book. I read that this year was pretty horrible and racist.

I would definitely pay money to watch some real sports though, like Roman gladiators, where somebody is definitely going to end up dead. Now that would be exciting and real entertainment, worth a few bucks at least.

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.