Twitter has lost out to Amazon in securing the rights to stream the year 2017 NFL’s Thursday Night Football games. Amazon though had to pay a heavy price for it, which has come to a whopping $50 million. That marks a five-fold increase over the $10 million that Twitter paid last year to NFL.
Interestingly, a clutch of social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter along with Amazon, of course, have bid to gain the streaming rights this year; with the world’s largest retailer eventually winning. Such a trend also underscores the importance that the video format has grown to be in recent times. No wonder, the fight to secure streaming rights is getting uglier too. Amazon is having to shell out five times more than the last year’s fees, and it is anybody’s guess where it could end up being the coming year.
Twitter, meanwhile might have a deeper wound to lick now that it has lost the chance to host the mega football event on its platform. That again is notwithstanding the fact that its current COO/CFO, Anthony Noto happens to be an ex-NFL CFO.
The micro blogging site is also seeking a rebirth of sorts after growth continues to be elusive. The company had earlier announced they would be prioritizing live video in their bid to draw in more visitors. Some advertisers though weren’t happy with Twitter beaming the football games last year, complaining of their being not enough viewers for their ads to have appreciable traction.
Twitter though had beamed the games for free for everyone to watch last year and did not even require the viewers to log in to the platform. Amazon too will be offering the games for free but only to its Prime customers. The retailer will have a few ad slots in each game to make good use of it to recover the costs.
As part of the deal, CBS and NBC will also be broadcasting the games live, but only five each. Verizon too will have the right to stream the games live to its wireless customers.
