NFL News And Rumors: Twitter Will Livestream Thursday's Football Match

By Jenn Loro - 06 Apr '16 14:32PM

NFL has just demonstrated how business savvy it is in marketing the right to broadcast some of the league's highly coveted games. A little over 10 years ago, Thursday night games were exclusively seen on the league's fledgling channel, the NFL Network. CBS and then NBC came knocking at their door and strike a deal to broadcast the games in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, to everybody's surprise, Twitter has just landed a heavyweight deal with NFL to stream its games (not just video clips) on the microblogging platform- a landmark so to speak as digital video giants fight each other to acquire such highly coveted right.

It has been reported that many other Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are also embroiled in a sharp-elbowed tussle to gain rights. Since NFL is surefire means to get enormous ratings and online traffic, the deal is pretty much a gold mine for Twitter.

"They need to give people more reasons to come back to Twitter to get their info-of-the-day fix. If these NFL games go well, they can expand into other types of content and give users more reasons to spend more time on Twitter properties each day," remarked SpringOwl Asset Management director Eric Jackson as quoted by New York Times.

The same line of thought is confirmed by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto as the tech firm ventures into new ways of distributing media content while integrating innovative ways of advertising.

"This is one element of a much larger strategy. We will continue to explore opportunities to partner with media and content companies to bring the best elements of live sports, live news and politics, and live entertainment to our users," Noto said as quoted in an interview by CNN Money.

After billing out the exclusive 10-game agreement with Twitter recently, Canadian NFL fans will be extremely disappointed to hear that the live streams won't be available to America's neighbor up north due to the league's contract with Sports Net which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the games.

"I'm told by the NFL that they will not be doing it in Canada," Scott Moore, president of Sports Net as quoted in a report by The Globe and Mail. "It's in respect to our rights agreement."