The NFL Will Stream 10 Thursday Night Games on Twitter Next Season
Twitter — the struggling social network made famous for its 140-character post length — just won the broadcast rights to stream 10 NFL Thursday games next season, Bloomberg Businessweek is reporting. Yeah, Twitter.
The company paid a whopping $10 million USD for the games — a shockingly insignificant sum compared to the NFL’s other broadcast deals.
CBS and NBC, for instance, each paid a staggering $45 million a game for five Thursday night contests over the next two years. And last year, Yahoo! paid $17 million for one game.
Twitter’s deal, by contrast, is essentially pennies on the dollar.
“We did not take the highest bidder on the table,” Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s executive vice president of media, told Bloomberg.
For the NFL, Twitter represents a chance to experiment with its broadcasts, to reach out to cord-cutters and bring them back into the fold. Ultimately, the deal will serve as a bargaining chip for when the league’s biggest broadcast deals expire in 2021.
It’s hard to say what watching the NFL on Twitter will look like, really. Frankly, it’s just hard to imagine being on Twitter for that long. I mean, three hours?
“Is it just going to be 1000 different vines?” one Sharp staffer asked.
As a casual NFL fan, my biggest concern is what the theme music will sound like. CBS has such an iconic tune. And you can’t beat that NBC theme. Do you think the Fox Sports robot will be available?
