Twitter’s NFL kickoff is good, but for whom?
With new way to tune into Thursday games, viewers, NFL and CBS all win. Jury is out on whether Twitter wins, too.
Twitter has successfully kicked off its Thursday Night Football streaming broadcasts. But how much teaming up with the NFL will help flush out new users is an open question.
Twitter’s Sept. 15 showing of the New York Jets-Buffalo Bills game drew 2.1 million viewers, plus another 200,000 if you add in the pregame show. That’s far below the 15.2 million who watched Yahoo’s Oct. 25, 2015, livestream of the Bills vs. Jacksonville Jaguars. However, that game was shown only online, while the Thursday Night Foot
ball broadcast appeared on CBS and NFL Network.
So far the partnership “looks like a clear win for the NFL and CBS,” analyst Joel Espelien of research firm The Diffusion Group says in a report on the deal. “The benefit to Twitter, if any, is much less clear.”
Viewers were winners, too, in gaining multiple new ways to watch NFL action. The problem is that modern video consumers “are basically platform agnostic,” Espelien said.
More viewers watched the Yahoo broadcast online because that was the only place to see it, he says. But the Twitter TNF game could be seen on many devices, so viewers will gravitate to “whatever platform is most convenient,” Espelien said, “which for a live NFL game on a Thursday night happens to be the settop box hooked up to their living room TV (and not Twitter).”
I watched portions of the game on desktop, smart-TV devices and on my smartphone, and each did a superb job of delivering the broadcast. I was able to watch high-quality video first on an Apple TV device and subsequently on an Amazon Fire TV, connected by wired Ethernet to a TV.
In general, I enjoyed watching the Twitter feed on the TV apps. Both allow you to toggle between seeing tweets or not. (The Twitter app is also available on Xbox Live; however, for some reason I could not get it to work.)
Some viewers noted that because the Twitter broadcast feed trailed that of traditional TV by 10 to 20 seconds or so, some tweets spoiled the outcome of the next play.
Another note on video quality: Even though the Apple and Amazon TV devices each displayed top-notch video, the quality fell short of that on CBS or NFL Network broadcasts on DirecTV or Verizon FiOS TV.
On my computer, I easily found a link to the Thursday
Night Football feed in the Trends column on the Twitter Home page. Game footage looked pristine on the desktop and on my smartphone.
The far bigger story for Twitter investors instead involves whether another company — specula- tion has included Google, Twitter and Disney — is planning to buy it. Shares surged in June and August on merger reports, which have revived in the last few days. Twitter stock has rallied 25% since Thursday, buoying optimism that had buckled in July when the company posted its eighth consecutive quarter of declining revenue growth and slowing user growth.
Twitter’s goal with the NFL deal — to stream a total of 10 Thursday night games this season for a reported $10 million — is a way to attract new users and perhaps some lapsed ones, intercept some advertising dollars and boost its cachet.