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Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

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Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#41

Post by omegaham »

koolba wrote: post #8
CrazyCatDog wrote: post #2

This is a huge deal for folks outside the US. Within the US, it's hard to imagine folks turning away from a television and onto a monitor/phone/tablet to watch football. Football feeds straight into the average American's robust average 4 hours of daily television viewing (1). Before you ask about cord-cutters, note that reliable numbers are relatively weak on that end (2). The original Twitter NFL Highlights deal se…

> This is a huge deal for folks outside the US. What makes you think you'll be able to stream this from an IP address outside of the US?

The NFL's past behavior has shown that they want to increase their market. Making football games available to everyone is one of the best ways to get international fans.

There are obstacles that prevent, say, a German or a Frenchman from actually getting into American football, just like there are obstacles that prevent an American from becoming a fan of the Bundesliga. Eliminating those obstacles would do wonders for increasing viewership.

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#42

Post by darkclarity »

jrcii wrote: post #31

Live sports moving online would be the final nail in the coffin of the cable television industry.

I can't see any online services ever competing with cable and satellite providers over sport. It would require deep pockets to convert paying customers to a new platform, plus the Internet isn't proprietary enough to physically capture the audience.

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#43

Post by fluxquanta »

gdulli wrote: post #35
jrcii wrote: post #31

Live sports moving online would be the final nail in the coffin of the cable television industry.

Streaming is a poor user experience compared to cable with a good DVR. In some ways it hits sports especially hard. Streaming is inherently rewind-unfriendly, that's something you want more often with sports. The whole smooth rewind/pause/fast-forward ability is a priority for me and would keep me on a Tivo forever. Even on a local bluray it's less convenient, with streaming it's a dealbreaker. Also, streaming is inh…

Streaming TV is only getting better.

I only watch TV for basketball, and when the grey-market streaming service I was using for NBA games got shut down, I wanted to at least be able to see the nationally televised (ESPN and TNT) games without cable.

I tried Sling for a month and it had issues, but for the past few weeks I've been using Playstation Vue it has been practically flawless. I'm on a 25/3 Time Warner connection running at least half a dozen connected devices during peak usage times, and I haven't seen a hiccup or quality drop once. The NCAA championship game last night was without buffering and looked great on my 4K TV (not in 4K, but the quality never changed to the point where I noticed any drop in clarity). It has some DVR functions depending on the program and channel as well.

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#44

Post by home_boi »

bdavisx wrote: post #34
hnrodey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The league made the point of saying the games will be free and that viewers do not have to be registered Twitter users. http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/15138355/twitter-wins-digi...

Yes, but I'm guessing if you want to see the twitter feed, you'll need to have an account (of course, I should probably read the whole article in case it talks about that too :)).

twitch.tv for sports?

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#45

Post by gdulli »

epa wrote: post #39
gdulli wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming is a poor user experience compared to cable with a good DVR. In some ways it hits sports especially hard. Streaming is inherently rewind-unfriendly, that's something you want more often with sports. The whole smooth rewind/pause/fast-forward ability is a priority for me and would keep me on a Tivo forever. Even on a local bluray it's less convenient, with streaming it's a dealbreaker. Also, streaming is inh…

All things that can be fixed with good software. These problems are someone's opportunity.

The hardware isn't being built with DVR-like storage and there's nothing software can do to create additional bandwidth when it becomes too scarce. Cable just works and my other devices and neighbors don't threaten it.

These problems all exist today and the needless but inevitable push for 4K is going to make them much worse.

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#46

Post by kodablah »

darkclarity wrote: post #42
jrcii wrote: post #31

Live sports moving online would be the final nail in the coffin of the cable television industry.

I can't see any online services ever competing with cable and satellite providers over sport. It would require deep pockets to convert paying customers to a new platform, plus the Internet isn't proprietary enough to physically capture the audience.

I believed this until I saw PSVue just recently[0]. It is the first non-cable/satellite to satisfy all of my sports needs. But at those prices, we're not far off from cable/satellite, so maybe we should just say the delivery medium is open to more providers than to say online vs not-online.

0 - http://psvue.com/

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#47

Post by GrinningFool »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #29

"Twitter also has a former NFL executive in its ranks: The company's chief financial officer previously held the same position at the league." Yeah, no conflict of interest there huh?

Why would that be a conflict?

At least to me, it seems no more a conflict than relying on your personal contacts to land your next job. Only the scale differs.

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#49

Post by jat850 »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #29

"Twitter also has a former NFL executive in its ranks: The company's chief financial officer previously held the same position at the league." Yeah, no conflict of interest there huh?

I'm not super well versed in legal issues, but can conflict of interest be a true concern in two privately-held companies? (I'm not challenging your sentiment as much as I am genuinely asking out of curiosity/lack of knowledge.)

Re: Twitter Wins NFL Deal to Stream 2016 Thursday Night Football

#50

Post by zerocrates »

dkrich wrote: post #38
arprocter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo did surprisingly well last season. IIRC they didn't make you sign up to watch

The Yahoo numbers posted in the article are a bit misleading because the London game was not available to watch on cable television in the U.S., so you were basically forced to watch it online, which is why Yahoo would pay such a large amount of money (and why their viewership was so high) to broadcast one game. Twitter, by comparison, is broadcasting the Thursday Night game alongside several other channels. I'd gues…

> On cable tv alone, there are two channels (NFL Network and CBS) that both broadcast the game.

The big one there is CBS, meaning that the game is already accessible even for cord-cutters, assuming they get acceptable reception from their local CBS station.

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