“Honey, turn on the Twitter so we can watch some football.”
Those words may actually be uttered in the near future, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Scott Soshnick.
Twitter is believed to have won a bid to hold digital rights to show the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games online.
From Soshnick’s report:
The social-media company was said to be bidding against a slate of heavyweights including Verizon Communications Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Facebook Inc. dropped out of the bidding last week, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions who asked not to be named because the talks were private.
The report does not specify when Twitter may begin showing the games, though a recent tweet from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell indicates it may be as soon as this fall.
This fall Thursday Night Football will be streamed live @twitter so fans will see more of this. https://t.co/s6tbr9FjvY
— Roger Goodell (@nflcommish) April 5, 2016
So why is this important?
It represents a new era in football broadcasting, which is surely to change the way that we consume SEC football in the near future.
The SEC already offers online streaming options through SEC Network and WatchESPN, but those options typically require a subscription to some variation of a television service.
As more people move away from conventional television as a means of receiving their entertainment, we’ll continue to see sports leagues make strategic partnerships with online companies as a new means of distributing their product.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this is how Twitter plans to integrate such programming with the social aspects of their internet presence.
Twitter gets wild enough during a typical game day in the fall, one can only imagine what bringing the digital broadcast to the platform might do for Twitter users.
Nick Cole is a former print journalist with several years of experience covering the SEC. Born and raised in SEC country, he has taken in the game-day experience at all 14 stadiums.
