If Twitter forces you to login to view this free stream, I feel like this could be significant for their user growth. If they are able to keep these users engaged by getting them started with users to follow, I think this could be very successful for them.
The pricing is also very interesting. Rumors are around $10 million for all the games (http://recode.net/2016/04/05/twitter-beats-amazon-verizon-fo...). The other bids were definitely higher, but I think this was a smart decision by the NFL. If Twitter can pull the live stream off with their strong live social capability, it would be great for both parties.
Disclaimer: The IF that twitter can pull of the live stream is a significant IF, not to be underestimated.
When determining who made this deal happen and at such a good price for Twitter, it's worth noting that Anthony Noto (Twitter's current CFO) used to be the CFO of the NFL -- I think he might have had a bit of influence.
Yes, but I'm guessing if you want to see the twitter feed, you'll need to have an account (of course, I should probably read the whole article in case it talks about that too :)).
I imagine they will go the Twitch.tv route and show the game alongside your twitter feed (maybe restricted to #some-hashtag) so you can chat with your mates while watching.
The Yahoo numbers posted in the article are a bit misleading because the London game was not available to watch on cable television in the U.S., so you were basically forced to watch it online, which is why Yahoo would pay such a large amount of money (and why their viewership was so high) to broadcast one game.
Twitter, by comparison, is broadcasting the Thursday Night game alongside several other channels. I'd guess that the number of people who actually use this service will be relatively small. On cable tv alone, there are two channels (NFL Network and CBS) that both broadcast the game.
> On cable tv alone, there are two channels (NFL Network and CBS) that both broadcast the game.
The big one there is CBS, meaning that the game is already accessible even for cord-cutters, assuming they get acceptable reception from their local CBS station.
Only for the first half of the season. Then it goes exclusive to NFL Network, except in the home markets of the teams playing (there it is also shown on CBS).
This is a huge deal for folks outside the US. Within the US, it's hard to imagine folks turning away from a television and onto a monitor/phone/tablet to watch football. Football feeds straight into the average American's robust average 4 hours of daily television viewing (1). Before you ask about cord-cutters, note that reliable numbers are relatively weak on that end (2).
The original Twitter NFL Highlights deal served a strategic purpose for the firm. This new deal looks like an advertising campaign to buy Twitter some much needed, new US mindshare.
In the US this deal is effectively irrelevant because the host network of the TNF game already has digital streaming rights. e.g. if the game is on CBS, CBS is also streaming it online, as they did last year. Twitter can also serve US customers the stream, but they're carrying CBS' stream, including all CBS ads, so they effectively are providing a free distribution network for the networks, presumably just to draw users to the service (though I fail to see how streaming video has anything to do with Twitter, every service is trying to be everything to everyone).
Outside of the US is where this deal has real relevance, because the US networks often geo-restrict their feeds. Though again it will be carrying the US network feed and ads.
Which is why Twitter "won" this bid with only $10M. It isn't really a big deal.
And Verizon has exclusive "smartphone" streaming rights tied up for years to come, so Twitter can't even stream to mobile (the form-factor that they've ridden to success)
The NFL's past behavior has shown that they want to increase their market. Making football games available to everyone is one of the best ways to get international fans.
There are obstacles that prevent, say, a German or a Frenchman from actually getting into American football, just like there are obstacles that prevent an American from becoming a fan of the Bundesliga. Eliminating those obstacles would do wonders for increasing viewership.
>> Within the US, it's hard to imagine folks turning away from a television and onto a monitor/phone/tablet to watch football.
Not really. So many of us have removed cable TV from our lives. It's not uncommon to see people at restaurants or work streaming live sports on a 4G device. I'll even pull up a stream on my second monitor instead of going in the living room to watch the game OTA.
Does depend where outside the US you mean - Sky in the UK show two, often three Sunday games, all the playoffs, Thanksgiving, and coverage in the UK increases year on year. If you live somewhere like London, finding a bar that shows the game is also trivial.
The real bugbear for UK fans is the often one sided / low quality nature of the games they send over here. In all the time that there's been NFL in London, they haven't sent two teams with a winning record to play each other.
Part of it is also that good teams do not want to give up 'home' games. So we end up getting teams like the Jags with a small fan base, or the Dolphins.
I am a little sad that Yahoo didn't win, having watched the Bills Jags game in London over the stream. It was really really high quality and well done. It was great to watch too.
I'm just happy to see the wheels start moving on sports to get them off of cable, though. Football looks like the one last reason a lot of people haven't become cable cutters
I'm not. When they picked up Community for season 6, they did such a bungling of release that most die-hard fans never even saw the 6th season (despite it being great). Yahoo's problem is that they throw too much at the wall and dont have enough bandwidth to follow through appropriately.
Streaming is a poor user experience compared to cable with a good DVR. In some ways it hits sports especially hard. Streaming is inherently rewind-unfriendly, that's something you want more often with sports. The whole smooth rewind/pause/fast-forward ability is a priority for me and would keep me on a Tivo forever. Even on a local bluray it's less convenient, with streaming it's a dealbreaker.
Also, streaming is inherently risky in the sense of random pauses, buffering, dynamic drops in resolution. For a live event, especially during a dramatic moment, that's not something I'd deal with. Twitter has no control over my network connection. I barely do.
I only watch TV for basketball, and when the grey-market streaming service I was using for NBA games got shut down, I wanted to at least be able to see the nationally televised (ESPN and TNT) games without cable.
I tried Sling for a month and it had issues, but for the past few weeks I've been using Playstation Vue it has been practically flawless. I'm on a 25/3 Time Warner connection running at least half a dozen connected devices during peak usage times, and I haven't seen a hiccup or quality drop once. The NCAA championship game last night was without buffering and looked great on my 4K TV (not in 4K, but the quality never changed to the point where I noticed any drop in clarity). It has some DVR functions depending on the program and channel as well.
Looking at the Playstation Vue plans right now and it doesn't look like these are any cheaper than regular cable TV $55/$45/$40 a month are the three tiers. Is there something I'm missing?
Pricing must be based on where you're located, because the lowest tier (all I need) is only $30 here. The biggest benefit for me is that when the NBA season's done I will just click a button and stop paying, then click another button and start again in October.
When I gave up on cable I had to take half a day off of work and drive an hour to the central office and say "no" a dozen times to their pleas to keep me on as a cable customer.
I have been streaming a lot more recently using Comcast streaming. The pros is I can watch live TV, pause/stop/rewind, and catch up on shows. The cons, is that their quality is crap about 75% of the time. Lags, hiccups, poor video/audio quality, and sometimes it just outright refuses to work. The other con is that it doesn't carry the full array of their channels, but that really isn't a big deal to me.
What I don't understand is given they are a cable company and have the infrastructure in place, you would think their quality would be superior or at least equal to other services. Instead it seems they spend more time and money bitching about other services and not trying to make theirs the best.
The hardware isn't being built with DVR-like storage and there's nothing software can do to create additional bandwidth when it becomes too scarce. Cable just works and my other devices and neighbors don't threaten it.
These problems all exist today and the needless but inevitable push for 4K is going to make them much worse.
Having to use a DVR is something specific to live cable broadcasts. Internet streaming doesn't need anything like that, since the Internet is inherently interactive.
Have you ever watched streaming sports on the Internet? Something like the MLB.tv platform, which is award-winning and used by millions of people not just for MLB but for other streaming media? It has rewind, picture-in-picture, the ability to watch multiple streams (home and away announcers) for the same event, the ability to either start from the beginning of the broadcast or start from live (and from live, rewind to the beginning if you so choose). You can also watch any game basically since baseball started being broadcast.
None of those things exist on cable. So I'm not sure why you're saying that cable is a better sports-watching medium. Why the hell would I ever need to rewind a local copy of the game?
>streaming is inherently risky in the sense of random pauses, buffering, dynamic drops in resolution.
Netflix works great for me. I've bought streaming packages for European soccer, also streamed Olympics and World Cup, so I don't know what you're talking about. It was great.
But OK, maybe you're like that guy who still has a landline because in emergencies landlines are more likely to work than a cell phone -no problem, I don't judge. For vast majority of users with residential connectivity, streaming is perfect.
-> Streaming is a poor user experience compared to cable with a good DVR.
I disagree, especially when considering how awesome MLB.tv is, and BAM (Baseball Advanced Media) in general. Any game I want (subject to a few blackout restrictions, which you can get around if you're so inclined), and I have the choice of home vs. away broadcast. I pay for 100 Mbps at my apartment, and haven't had an issue with streaming games thus far this season - didn't last year either. And the ability to watch multiple Baseball games at once is simply amazing. So much Baseball! The price point dropped this season because of an out-of-court settlement[1]. As far as rewinding....for live sports?...meh. MLB and their partner broadcasters do a pretty solid job with replay.
Every year is the same for me: I have cable up until Baseball season starts, then I cancel it and just get MLB.tv because that's all I watch anyway. I doubt this issue will go away for MLB. Eventually I think enough pressure is going to hit these local networks that they'll face more problems in the future.
So perhaps if you limit the scope of your comment to streaming television shows...maybe, but I doubt it. If I'm streaming a TV show on HBO Go/Hulu/whatever...doesn't that mean I by-definition have all rewind/pause/etc control?
I can't see any online services ever competing with cable and satellite providers over sport. It would require deep pockets to convert paying customers to a new platform, plus the Internet isn't proprietary enough to physically capture the audience.
I believed this until I saw PSVue just recently[0]. It is the first non-cable/satellite to satisfy all of my sports needs. But at those prices, we're not far off from cable/satellite, so maybe we should just say the delivery medium is open to more providers than to say online vs not-online.
The data readily show that young people are not paying customers [of cable services]. In the long term, professional sports organizations have to go online to maintain relevance to home/casual viewers.
sigh would be nice if it was somebody with a better-supported streaming experience like YouTube. I've already got a YouTube app on about 3 devices connected to my TV. I'm sure not going to watch on a computer. Maybe twitter will come up with an AppleTV app....
In 2015, CBS and NFL network "teamed up" to provide coverage of Thursday night football, which meant... the first half of the season was available over-the-air, and the second half was cable-only.
This will give Twitter an potentially useful combination of data and streaming rights.
Imagine watching the game on twitter, and you see an amazing play happen. You would be able to tweet about the play right away, because there is a text box near the video. Tweeting reactions is nothing new, but twitter doesn't know where in the game viewers are when they write their reaction tweets. With this new setup twitter knows what play you are talking about, because it is watching you watch the game. It is easy to see where you are in the stream.
They could automate the process of creating a highlights reel, featuring the most re-tweeted tweets as commentary.
So, we'll be watching it in six second chunks? Play by play 140 characters at a time?
I joke, but my point is actually that this feels very off brand for Twitter. Maybe for Periscope, but even there, it's about the first-person, crowd-sourced, "raw" and authentic perspective. It isn't about massively produced media circuses like pro-sports are.
Sure, I see the value others have highlighted – it'll prop up the user base, etc., but it definitely will also fragment the user base as well.
There actually was a pretty neat use-case for live streaming via periscope last year. I'm a pretty big hockey fan (to the point where I follow beat writers of teams I don't consider myself a fan of). Last season there started to be a trend of writers using periscope to live-stream warmups and postgame interviews. It was neat to get that level of access, despite the video quality not being great. About a month after people started doing it, the league stepped in to say that live streams constituted "broadcast without consent" and most people stopped doing it.
> About a month after people started doing it, the league stepped in to say that live streams constituted "broadcast without consent" and most people stopped doing it.
Think this is a very overlooked part of the deal. I'd imagine NFL will not give explicit permission but look the other way if people post videos on Twitter. Very powerful for increasing interaction and introducing people who are new to the service (follow _____ for ____ games)
I'm not super well versed in legal issues, but can conflict of interest be a true concern in two privately-held companies? (I'm not challenging your sentiment as much as I am genuinely asking out of curiosity/lack of knowledge.)
It's different from organization to organization. In this case, it would be easy to say the preferential treatment granted to a former employee (even though they had higher bids from other companies) could be deemed a conflict of interest.
From the NFL's own Compliance Plan:
Generally speaking, a conflict of interest arises when an employee has a competing interest or loyalties that are, or could be, at odds with each other. These competing interests may occur as the result of engaging in outside or other personal activities, or due to personal relationships.
The personal relationships between the former NFL employee and the current employee in that same position could easily be seen as a conflict of interest.
I heard it explained that the reason that Twitter got the nod was because the NFL was concerned about losing young viewers because they were cable cutters.
If this logic is correct you can expect the NBA, NHL, MLB and NASCAR to cut deals with Twitter. This is a direction that I didn't expect Twitter to go.
Wow! I think this is actually pretty huge. Granted it puts a lot of pressure on Twitter to execute. I have a ton of questions to ask, so you can ignore the following, but I just wanted to put some of these questions out there.
Where in the current Twitter UI will users be able to access this? Are they going to all of a suddent develop AppleTV/Roku viewing apps? Is the stream using Periscope backend? Can it even handle that quality? Will there be a push for Periscope at all? If Twitter is paying for rights to show the games, where is the monetization? So it's just to acquire users? How will acquiring users to view games translate to users that will use Twitter? Will advertisers be streaming live tweets that are dynamically relative to what's going on?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the networks usually provide the commentary and coverage? Does this mean that Twitter will provide the sportscasters?
And does this mean that Twitter gets to sell advertising on the stream (commercial breaks, on-screen ads)? Twitter should be able to do some extremely targeted advertising...
Why do I want to tweet while watching the game? How does taking your attention off the game by multitasking enhance the experience in any way? This seems like a desperate move to me on Twitter's part. Football is about drinking a few beers and watching the game with a couple of friends not hashtags.
Tweeting during live events is pretty much how my regular (don't work in tech) friends use Twitter. I would wager that many/most people use Twitter this way.
The pricing is also very interesting. Rumors are around $10 million for all the games (http://recode.net/2016/04/05/twitter-beats-amazon-verizon-fo...). The other bids were definitely higher, but I think this was a smart decision by the NFL. If Twitter can pull the live stream off with their strong live social capability, it would be great for both parties.
Disclaimer: The IF that twitter can pull of the live stream is a significant IF, not to be underestimated.