Twitter and the NFL: the Halftime Report

Twitter and the NFL are in the middle of their ten-game Thursday Night Football live streaming schedule, so it's time for a halftime report.

The NFL is seeing a broadcast ratings dip this season. Sports Illustrated suggests that's due to a combination of factors, including the drama of the presidential election, a lack of star matchups, and oversaturation. But one thing increasing viewership is the live streaming Twitter offers for 10 Thursday night games. It looks like live streaming is adding to overall viewing, not merely shifting it. Twitter has received positive reviews for its streams, while viewership is modest at a few hundred thousand per game.

To get an assessment of Twitter and the NFL's partnership, we contacted representatives from both organizations. In an email interview with Anthony Noto, Twitter's chief financial officer, we asked what lessons his company had learned, and how it planned to put those lessons into effect.

There were a lot of lessons learned and we are iterating at a fast pace, Noto said. I think the best way to answer the question is that we feel like broadcast networks did when they aired their first televised sports broadcasts. Now, years later, the broadcast experience is well beyond what anyone could have imagined. It's early for us, in fact we like to say it's day one, and we couldn't be more excited to be pioneering a new way to enjoy live sports and live conversation in one centralized place.

Specifically, we can look to offer more personalized options in the timeline you follow while watching. We will also focus on building in more ways to discover our live product and make it seamless in finding what is important to you.

Since this is a halftime report, what will the second half look like? How will Twitter improve the live video experience for the remainder of the schedule?

We want to continue to improve the overall experience in terms of product features in the video player, as well as the curated timelines, Noto said. We also want to build the awareness that Twitter is a dependable place to find what's happening in live streaming video and the conversation about those events. And we plan to expand our global offering of live sports, as well as live news, politics, and entertainment.

That would be welcome, since there's a growing appetite for live content online. What about video quality? Critics have been positive about Twitter's HD NFL stream. Is the company happy with video quality and the amount of latency?

We were very pleased with the high fidelity of the video as well as the low latency. Our team has done an incredible job in a short period of time to deliver on a great experience. We launched with our live video player and curated tweet timeline on several connected device partner platforms including Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Xbox One, as well as web syndication partners Sports Illustrated, Time, and AOL, Noto said. We will continue to look into partnering with additional syndication partners to broaden our reach. In addition, we want to continue to improve the live video experience on these wide range of clients as well as on our mobile apps and desktop. We will also look into adding functionality that will allow you to multitask on Twitter while still viewing the video or having the audio play in the background.

Its deal with Twitter wasn't the NFL's first experiment with live streaming, but it is the most significant. With the top content it offers, the NFL could have taken several different routes online. We asked an NFL spokesperson by email if the league was happy with the results so far, and got a peek into its reasoning for going with Twitter.

We are pleased with the early results from our partnership with Twitter around Thursday Night Football. The most obvious reaction is how great the video looks on their platform which was a key consideration, the spokesperson said. The numbers we are seeing on the Twitter platform for Thursday Night Football are in line with our expectations and show that we are really adding incremental audience to what the television broadcast brings to the table. One of the reasons we ultimately chose Twitter for this partnership is that their platform is so complimentary to television. Twitter has shown the ability in many, many instances to drive audience to the television broadcast and that's what we were hoping they would do with this and what we feel they have done. The audience on Twitter is typically younger than what we see with our television broadcasts and they are predominately accessing the stream via mobile devices.

So, for the NFL, going online isn't just a way to keep up with technology; it's also a way to connect with younger viewers. It's easier to put content where viewers are than attract viewers to a different platform.

Like the rest of the entertainment industry, we want to be in front of the next generation .and as we all know, more and more the next generation is accessing content, and in particular, large amounts of video, on digital devices. In order to continue to grow the popularity of our game we need to expose the next generation to NFL football and that is why you are seeing us strategically pursue opportunities like this partnership with Twitter, or our partnership with Snapchat, the NFL spokesperson said.

The NFL's other big push online is NFL Now, which is both an online platform and an in-house studio for creating original online content. It offers several weekly shows such as Celebration Station (about touchdown celebrations), Fashion Po-Po (player fashions), and NFL Trendzone (the week in social media). Every game day it creates a long program called Game Day Blitz, and it even makes a show for Snapchat called NFL Remix. The effort seems to be paying off: The to

LINK:	http://www.sportsvideo.org/2016/10/31/twitter-and-the-nfl-the-halftime...
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