Nick Piccone
Twitter will broadcast 10 Thurday Night Football games nationally this coming NFL season. The deal will cost around $10 million. More from Bloomberg:
This is a triumph for Twitter, which is struggling to attract new users and expand its content beyond the posts of journalists, politicians and celebrities. Success with NFL games will also pave the way for more video deals that could include other professional sports, political content, and eventually entertainment, Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said in an interview.
“This is one element of a much broader strategy to provide the next generation of real-time content,” said Noto, who was the NFL’s Chief Financial Officer until 2010. He joined Twitter in 2014, and last year the social media company signed an agreement to distribute NFL highlights and other clips.
For the NFL, this is a chance to experiment. The league is aware that a growing number of households are comfortable streaming video over the Internet, and this is an opportunity to appeal to so-called cord-cutters, as former cable-TV subscribers are known. The NFL has streamed selected games, but this is its first season-long streaming deal.
Twitter doesn’t have exclusive rights to those games, however. They’ll be sharing delivering the content with NBC, CBS and the NFL Network. The social media site beat out Verizon, Yahoo!, Amazon, among a plethora of others for the service.