Twitter’s First Crack At Streaming NFL Hits Its Mark

With its second installment on deck tomorrow in New England, Twitter looks to continue streaming NFL success after last week’s first attempt. 

Twitter’s (TWTR) stock price rose an initial 5% in the wake of its first attempt to stream Thursday night NFL games via its social network, a direct sign that the company’s first swing hit the mark. Although, judging from some of their harsher critics, it wasn’t enough of a success to get overly excited about the company moving forward.

While the numbers released fell short of what Yahoo’s first attempt brought in last year, Twitter’s Thursday night draw of 243,000 users per any minute and 2.1 million overall reach were very solid, to say the least.

From my point of view, from an overall experience perspective, it fit perfectly into my comfort zone.

If you wanted to watch the experience last year, you had to head directly to Yahoo. There, the stream and event were heavily (and wisely) billed as a “beta test” to the curious and ever-growing sports tech world. It was also a beta for prospective buyers, as Yahoo would soon put itself up for auction, ultimately doing a deal with Verizon this past July.

Ironically, Yahoo’s messaging was done so heavily through a combination of Tweets on Twitter –who got a first-hand look on how it was produced before pulling the trigger on the $10 million dollar rights deal to stream 10 NFL games — and to their subscriber base. The Yahoo game was also streamed early morning in the U.S. on the day made for NFL football, Sunday, during a time where you would picture the behavior of most users drinking coffee with their laptops open.

In Twitter’s case, they not only had to compete against Thursday night prime time TV lineups, they also had to deal with an in-her-prime Charlize Theron, as AMC scheduled The Italian Job at 8pm while The Shawshank Redemption was on Spike TV at the same time.

I know, talk about competition.

Let’s stay on viewer behavior for a second because, in my estimation, that’s the biggest factor Wall Street seems to be ignoring. HOW people watch is as important these days as the number of people WHO watch. While Twitter’s short term strategy would appear to be locked in on engineering and getting the production value of the games down to a science, the long term play would seem to be locking in NFL Sundays by using the Twitter app as the supplemental device to bundled TV packages. Meaning, you can still sit at the bar or on your couch and watch the games of your choice, but the game you want to be focused on will be in your hand a place right next to where your Fantasy Sports App du jour resides.

Twitter has now successfully, and quickly, fit into a one-stop mobile shop as a media and live event platform in the way Facebook has as the world’s greatest digital photo album and content destination platform — all without advertising.

Speaking of advertising, at one point I counted up to 18 advertisers whose ads ran in the streaming NFL Twitter mobile environment and not on the NFL Network. The experiences were choppy and not well-produced, but at a reported user rate of 243,000 per minute with an average watch time of 22 minutes, advertisers have to be thrilled with the results that they most certainly got great deals on as early adopters. Among those advertisers were some heavy hitters like Microsoft, Netflix, Verizon and GMC, just to name a few.

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Roberts (@readDanWrite) explains here:

"And while Twitter’s numbers were smaller than Yahoo’s, it also paid far less: a reported $10 million for 10 games, compared to $20 million for a single game. The difference: Yahoo was able to sell all the ads that ran during its stream, while Twitter could only sell a small portion, about 15 ads, the same as the portion of local ads you see when watching an NFL game on national television.Twitter had great success with selling those ads. The Wall Street Journal reports that big consumer-facing brands like Bank of America (BAC) and AB-InBev have bought packages worth between $1 million and $8 million each. (The advertisers likely paid close to $1 million per game.) The ads had a 98% completion rate, meaning viewers didn’t shut the stream off when an ad came on."

There’s also this note, which is a fair observation, from SI’s Richard Deitsch:

Functionally, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows so the criticism will stand out and it will be on CEO Jack Dorsey to take those criticisms surrounding the Twitter NFL streaming experience and communicate them with his Product Team. Fortunately for Dorsey, he’s able to use his own platform as basically the world’s largest suggestions box.

One minor criticism here is that the comments feed quickly becomes tiresome as a hot take superhighway, which is why watching it on a phone is optimal as you can rotate it to remove the noisy feed. That “bug fix” took me all of three seconds to do.

Of course, there were your standard buffering stalls and feed breaks during action that forced me to find the remote control (one occurred during the car chase scene of all possible times). But you live with those things as part of a new experience and hope that the application and means of digesting the streaming of NFL games will become more palatable.

"“I think it’s a decent start but you’re absolutely right. How would anybody even know it’s on Twitter unless you’re on Twitter already?” Gerber Kawasaki President Ross Gerber told CNBC’s Closing Bell.  “Twitter seems to be completely self-absorbed and they don’t quite get that people don’t know that the NFL is on Twitter unless they’re on Twitter already.”"

All-in-all, it was an impressive kickoff for both the NFL and Twitter; the early returns suggest as much. One can only assume it will get even better from here, but will it forge enough growth to make people come out of pocket to support the stock?

Or can Twitter successfully sustain itself, at least for now, on its own ad revenues while streaming NFL games?

We shall see.

*****

Tommy Dee is a sports and technology entrepreneur who advises start ups from the ground floor. He teaches sports and technology at Manhattanville College and is a contributor for SportsNet New York.