The social-media company was said to be bidding against a slate of heavyweights including Verizon Communications Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Facebook Inc. dropped out of the bidding last week, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions who asked not to be named because the talks were private.
The deal gives Twitter a key piece of content to attract mainstream users in its quest to make its service a go-to place to react to and discuss live events. The NFL, aware that a growing number of households are comfortable streaming video over the Internet, is using the digital rights for Thursday night games to reach so-called cord-cutters, as former cable-TV subscribers are known.
Twitter shares gained 2.4 percent to $17.50 in early trading. NFL and Twitter spokesmen didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
“This should be favorable for Twitter in terms of creating a product that will encourage people to show up and use it,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. “Twitter has placed a lot of emphasis around its relevance to live activities. They haven’t invested what presumably will be a lot of money in owning the rights to this sort of activity in quite some time. It probably will help them with user growth numbers.”
Terms of the deal weren’t immediately available. Last season, Yahoo paid $17 million to stream a game from London, which was played at 9:30 a.m. New York time and also broadcast on network TV in the teams’ home markets. On American TV, the league commands the highest per-game price for any sport on American TV. In the most recent broadcast deal, CBS Corp. and Comcast Corp.’s NBC each paid about $45 million a game for five Thursday night contests for the 2016 and 2017 seasons.
Twitter would probably broadcast the games as a part of the six-month-old Moments feature, which could package a live event alongside commentary, behind-the-scenes tweets, and other content.
The league is using Thursday night games, which draw smaller audiences than the contests on Sundays and Mondays, to experiment with different kinds of media, distribution models and technologies. By the time the NFL’s biggest broadcast contracts expire in 2021, it will be prepared to sell a broad array of digital rights -- and make more money.
As it hits its 10-year mark, Twitter is struggling to bring new users on board and expand beyond being a platform used mostly by journalists, politicians and celebrities. It has been experimenting with ideas such as curated tweets and a new algorithmic timeline.
Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey says Twitter’s role in the world centers around bringing people together to watch live events in the place where information comes the fastest.
Twitter, whose Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto is a former CFO of the NFL, signed an agreement last year with the NFL to distribute highlights and other clips on the service.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-05/twitter-said-to-win-nfl-deal-for-thursday-night-streaming-rights
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