Twitter Gets Deal to Stream NFL Thursday Games--3rd Update
05 Avril 2016 - 4:04PM
Dow Jones News
By Joshua Jamerson
Twitter Inc. has received the global rights to stream the
National Football League's Thursday night games online, the league
said Tuesday in a push to make more games available to cord-cutters
and globally.
Twitter will stream the 10 Thursday Night Football games
broadcast by NBC and CBS, which also will be simulcast on NFL
Network. The league said the arrangement allows the games to be
seen on broadcast television, cable television and digitally.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Under the agreement, Twitter also will be able to show in-game
highlights from Thursday Night Football and pregame Periscope
broadcasts from players and teams. Periscope is the live-streaming
video app that Twitter acquired last year.
Shares of Twitter, down 66% over the past year, rose 2% to
$17.44 in morning trading in New York.
"People watch NFL games with Twitter today," said Jack Dorsey,
Twitter's chief executive, in prepared remarks. "Now they'll be
able to watch right on Twitter Thursday nights."
The NFL in February reached an agreement with CBS and NBC to
carry five Thursday games each. Selling streaming rights to
Thursday games won't affect CBS and NBC's rights to offer the games
online to their pay-TV subscribers, and executives for both
networks said they didn't believe the Thursday streaming would cut
into their audiences.
"There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening
on Twitter during our games," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said
in prepared remarks. Mr. Goodell made the first public announcement
Tuesday morning in a tweet, which was accompanied by a video
compilation of football highlights. It was Mr. Goodell's first
tweet since September 2014.
The league has teased the idea of a partnership with an Internet
company for years, with its boldest step coming last year, when
Yahoo paid $20 million for the league's first streaming-only
broadcast, an Oct. 25 game between the Buffalo Bills and
Jacksonville Jaguars. The event was an experiment for the NFL,
which wanted to see how viewers, advertisers and technology
companies would respond to games on digital platforms. The Yahoo
game drew 2.36 million viewers.
Twitter has sought to be a bigger player in live events. Last
year, Twitter bid on the right to stream the October game but lost
out to Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal reported. Also last year
Twitter launched its curated news feature "Moments," in which
editors highlight top tweets about live events.
Twitter has been emphasizing its strength in live content since
co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to the helm in October. While
Twitter's 320 million active user base is smaller than competitors
such as Facebook Inc., its fast-paced nature has made it the
unrivaled place for live content such as sports highlights and
breaking news.
Twitter hopes nabbing the rights to exclusive content will make
it an even more desirable destination for people as these live
events unfold, which the company hopes in the long run will help
reinvigorate its stalled user growth. Last year, Twitter and the
NFL signed a two-year deal that enabled the social-media service to
distribute highlights and other content.
Twitter has stressed that its actual audience extends beyond the
320 million accounts that sign in at least once a month. It has
argued that when combined with the number of people that see
Twitter content away from the service, such as when a tweet is
embedded in a news story or surfaced in a Google search result, its
audience grows to 800 million.
Write to Joshua Jamerson at joshua.jamerson@wsj.com and Yoree
Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 05, 2016 09:49 ET (13:49 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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