Twitter last week announced that it had entered into a deal with NFL to acquire broadcast rights to ten Thursday night National Football League games during the 2016 season. Reports suggest that Twitter paid $10 million for this package and its closest competitor Facebook was also interested in these broadcast rights, but later withdrew from the bidding process. In addition to live streaming of the games, the NFL-Twitter partnership includes in-game highlights as well as pre-game Periscope broadcasts from players and teams. The NFL is indeed very popular, such that the Thursday night games alone attracted 17 million users in the last season. Twitter has struggled to increase not only the number of users on its platform, but their engagement as well. This deal should enable the company to leverage its “live” platform and keep users engaged for longer, as they watch and tweet posts about the games on its platform. However the advertising revenue potential from this deal is limited as the company will not be able to sell any national advertising spots during the game and advertising revenue will be limited to local ads. We believe the NFL streaming should popularize this platform and increase user engagement in the short term. However the company might have to focus on several such initiatives in future to create a longer term impact.

from Forbes – Tech http://ift.tt/1NkTAlz
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