After an uneventful off-season involving concussions and the retirement of Peyton Manning, the NFL scored its biggest touchdown Tuesday.
In what may be considered a landmark deal in today’s era of social media, Twitter won the bid to stream ten of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games for free during the upcoming 2016-17 season. In an era of more cost-conscious consumers looking to cut the cord from over-charging cable companies, Twitter scoring such a deal gives rise to the hope that other major sports league will soon look for more platforms to showcase their product and brand.
Aligning itself with America’s new de facto pastime in football, and it’s most powerful sports league in the form of the NFL, is a win-win for ten-year old San Francisco-based micro-blogging company. With revenue slightly north of $2 billion and $2.21, the prospect of attracting more traffic to its site in the form of die-hard thirsty NFL fans, is sure to make Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey and fellow co-founders Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams do somersaults.
In a recent Market Watch article written by Kathleen Burke titled, “Why The Twitter NFL Deal Will Have Fans Cheering” talking about the new deal, she alludes to the fact that Twitter is in an advantageous position thanks to consumers dissatisfaction with cable,
“As more cable customers cut the cord due to rising prices and hidden fees, the move to social media could usher in a new, more personalized era of how fans will watch sports. “Twitter is the ultimate representation of consumer-generated content and personalization,” says Warren Packard, chief executive of Thuuz, a service that provides instant alerts to sports fans for must-watch sports moments. “It’s the ultimate destination for real-time content.”
Burke would go on to state further that the ease of access would also attract mobile users on the go,
“This ease of access could attract mobile consumers of all ages who wouldn’t typically invest the three hours to sit and watch a Thursday night game on television. About 75% of sports fans had watched games on their smartphones and 46% had watched on their tablets in the third quarter of 2014, according to a sports media report by market research firm Nielsen. With a mobile audience of 72.3 million in October 2014, fans spent an average of 99 minutes consuming sports content on smartphones during that month, a nearly 36% increase from 2012, according to the report.”
The new NFL-Twitter alliance is the perfect marriage and convergence of technology, entertainment, sports and social media, and what makes this even more perfect is that both partners make the other better in terms of increasing each other’s brand exposure and market value.
Based on the above, it sounds like all parties alike indeed have a reason to celebrate this coming fall.