National Football League

Twitter's First Crack at Streaming NFL Hits Mark

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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With its second installment on deck tomorrow in New England, Twitter looks to continue streaming NFL success from last week’s first attempt 

Twitter’s (TWTR) stock price rose an initial 5% in the wake of the first attempt to stream Thursday NFL games via its social network, a direct sign that its first edition hit the mark. Although, judging from some of their harsher critics, it wasn’t enough of a success to get overly excited about the company moving forward.

While the numbers released fell short of what Yahoo’s first attempt brought in last year, Twitter’s Thursday night draw of 243,000 users per any minute and 2.1 million overall reach were very solid to say the least. From my point of view, from an overall experience perspective, it fit perfectly in my comfort zone.

If you wanted to watch the experience last year, you had to head directly to Yahoo.  There, the stream and event were heavily (and wisely) billed as a “beta test” to the curious and ever-growing sports tech world. It was also a beta for prospective buyers, as Yahoo would soon put itself up for auction ultimately doing a deal with Verizon this past July.

Ironically, Yahoo’s messaging was done so heavily through a combination of Tweets on Twitter, who got a first-hand look on how it was produced before pulling the trigger on the $10 million dollar rights deal to stream 10 NFL games, and to their subscriber base. The Yahoo game was also streamed early morning in the States on the day made for NFL football, Sunday, during a time where you would think the behavior of most users were drinking coffee with their laptops open. Twitter not only had to compete against Thursday night prime time network television lineups, they had to deal with in-her-prime Charlize Theron as AMC scheduled The Italian Job at 8pm, while The Shawshank Redemption was on Spike TV at the same time.

I know, talk about competition.

Let’s stay on viewer behavior for a second because that’s the biggest factor that Wall Street seems to be ignoring for the time being in my estimation. HOW people watch is as important these days as the number of people WHO watch. While Twitter’s short term strategy would appear to be locked in on engineering and getting the production of the games figured out, the long term play would seem to be locking in NFL Sundays using the Twitter app as the supplemental device to bundled TV packages.

Meaning, you can still sit at the bar or your couch and watch the game or games of your choice, but the game you want to be focused on will be in your hand a place right next to where your Fantasy Sports App du jour resides. Twitter has now successfully, and quickly, fit into a one-stop mobile shop as a media and live event platform in the way Facebook has as the world’s greatest photo book and content destination platform – all without advertising.

Speaking of advertising, at one point I counted up to 18 advertisers whose ads ran in the streaming NFL Twitter mobile environment and not on the NFL Network. The experiences were choppy and not well-produced, but at a reported user rate of 243,000 per minute with an average watch time of 22 minutes, advertisers have to be thrilled with the results that they most certainly got great deals on as early adopters. Among those advertisers were heavy hitters like Microsoft, Netflix, Verizon and GMC just to name a few. Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Roberts (@readDanWrite) explains here:

Functionally, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows so criticism like these will stand out and it will be on CEO Jack Dorsey to take the criticisms surrounding streaming NFL and communicate  them with his Product Team. Fortunately, he’s able to use his own platform as basically the world’s largest suggestions box.

One criticism here is that the comments feed quickly becomes tiresome as a hot take superhighway, which is why watching it on the phone is optimal as you can rotate it to remove the noisy feed. That took me all of three seconds to do.

Of course, there were your standard buffering stalls and feed breaks during action that forced me to find the remote control – one occurred during the car chase scene of all possible times. But you live with those things as part of a new experience and hope that the application and means of digesting the streaming NFL games will become more palatable.

All-in-all it was an impressive kickoff for both the NFL and Twitter and the early returns suggest as much. You can assume it will get better from here, but will it forge enough growth to make people come out of pocket to support the stock?

Or can Twitter successfully just sustain itself for now on its own ad revenues while streaming NFL?

We shall see.

Tommy Dee is a sports and technology entrepreneur who advises start ups from the ground floor. He teaches sports and technology at Manhattanville College and is a contributor for SportsNet New York.  

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