Twitter’s 10-game Thursday Night Football live streaming package with the NFL has generated enough interest to where fans of the social media site’s free coverage were left wondering last week why there was no stream.
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Twitter only has the streaming rights to the Thursday Night Football games broadcast by CBS and NBC, but not the eight games broadcast on NFL Network.
So Twitter reached out to the personal accounts of dozens of those fans who likely didn’t have NFL Network, explaining that it was a bye week for the Twitter stream on a night when the Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals played. Some thought it was “weird” the game wasn’t on Twitter, which replied that the feeling was mutual.
#TNF returns next week LIVE streaming on Twitter when the @AZCardinals take on the @49ers. Check the schedule to see upcoming games. pic.twitter.com/7Ir5mZc2Sh
— Twitter Sports (@TwitterSports) September 29, 2016
It’s that kind of devotion from fans to the second-screen experience that Twitter hopes will enable the live streaming to help the company grow, as the stream returns this Thursday with a game it has the streaming rights to when the Arizona Cardinals face the San Francisco 49ers.
Twitter’s most recent Thursday Night Football stream on Sept. 22 drew an average audience of 327,000, which was up 34 percent from the inaugural stream, according to the NFL During the New England Patriots-Houston Texans game, Twitter reached 2.2 million viewers who streamed the game for a minimum of three seconds with the video being 100 percent in view.
The average audience watching the Thursday Night Football season premiere on Sept. 15 was only 243,000 with each viewer watching an average of 22 minutes of game action. That led to an ad buyer’s reaction like this one after the game:
“While we felt the platform delivered on our client expectation based on our valuation, it’s worth noting that the average minute audience delivery for our clients was less than half of the Twitter nonguaranteed projections,” Optimum SportsManaging Director Jeremy Carey, who oversees accounts for Infiniti, Pepsi and Lowe’s told SportsBusiness Journal, according to Awful Announcing.
“Optimum Sports’ expectation is likely similar to that of Twitter and the NFL. We are going to learn a great deal over the course of this season about the value of this audience and how to optimize within a space that affords us the ability to better understand and communicate with the consumer. If we can do that while providing a valuable audience to our clients at the right cost, it’s a win-win for everyone.”