“Twitter Inc., making a strategic push into online programming, won a deal to show Thursday night National Football League games online, a person familiar with the matter said,” Scott Soshnick reports for Bloomberg. “The social-media company was said to be bidding against a slate of heavyweights including Verizon Communications Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.”
“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,” Soshnick reports. “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.”
“‘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,” Soshnick reports. “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… 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.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is a smart strategic move for Twitter that has the potential to jumpstart user growth for a service that has difficulty explaining its raison d’être to Joe and Jane Sixpack.
Don’t care.
Don’t care that you don’t care. I care.
Twitter. For shallow people.
Phones. For shallow people.
Walkie-talkies. For shallow people.
Passing notes in class. For shallow people.
Fedex. For shallow people.
Bulletin boards in public squares. For shallow people.
Seriously? Twitter is a communication medium. Different people use it for different reasons.
Let me fix your comment:
Twitter. For human beings, a large percentage of whom are shallow and will use any available communication medium to make that clear.
Twitter is a waste of digital space, mainly for celebrities and the complete morons who ‘follow’ them hanging onto every word.
You just don’t get it, do you?
Think about the irony of you making that comment while thinking this comment thread is the ideal place to pontificate about things you don’t understand.
I understand perfectly. One day you might too. Twitter is for losers. There.
what’s your handle?
Smokey the f’n bear.
Surprised at the dumb replies so far. Am I the only one who sees this as a big win for Apple TV if this is done through Periscope?