From a couch in a home office in the Bay Area, two huge NBA fans have amassed a Twitter following for their live broadcasts and have unwittingly ushered in a new way to watch sports.
Nate Duncan and Danny Leroux are living their childhood dreams. From a cushy couch in Duncan’s home, a large #twitterNBAshow banner strung up on the wall behind them, the amateur sportscasters spout technical facts and predictions while watching basketball games.
It’s something they’d be doing in their spare time anyway. But with #twitterNBAshow, their analysis is broadcast live to thousands of followers through Periscope, Twitter’s live video app.
“What kid isn’t sitting in their basement and wanting to call a game — that’s everyone’s fantasy, and we’re lucky to have had a following to be able to do it,” Duncan told SportTechie by phone last week.
Finals G2 Pregame Periscope 360 https://t.co/viTmvEdV9u
— Nate Duncan (@NateDuncanNBA) June 4, 2017
The show airs during most games and will resume again during the NBA Finals when the Golden State Warriors travel to Cleveland on Wednesday for Game 3 against the Cavaliers.
Duncan and Leroux chose not to broadcast for the Finals games in Oakland because they were credentialed to cover the games in person for other publications. Duncan has the Warriors winning the NBA Finals in five games. Leroux has them winning in six.
The #twitterNBAshow is meant to be consumed as a second-screen experience — meaning viewers can watch it at the same time they’re watching the game at home. When the game goes to commercial, Duncan and Leroux continue to broadcast, often responding to viewer questions and comments. They’ll sit there for as many as six hours straight if there’s a doubleheader.
“Because we have such good engagement with the audience, it carries you through and before you realize it you’ve been on air for six hours and it really doesn’t seem like it has been that long,” Duncan said.
This new interactive second-screen sports-watching phenomenon is starting to catch on. In a report published in 2015, Accenture found that 87 percent of consumers use a second-screen device while watching TV. At the time, the key demographic of 14- to 17-year-olds were abandoning the TV screen at a rate of 33 percent for movies and TV shows and 26 percent for sporting events.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
Those numbers are undoubtedly higher now as more people continue to cut the cable cord and as sports teams, leagues and networks begin streaming more games and shows. Twitter and Facebook now both stream games regularly. ESPN recently laid off 100 people, including many traditional TV sportscasters, and pledged to expand its online presence.
Twitter contacted #twitterNBAshow last fall to see if Duncan and Leroux would provide content in exchange for a spot on Twitter’s line-up of live video broadcasts — they agreed. In exchange, they were also given equipment and a studio from which they occasionally broadcast at the Twitter headquarters.
It’s not unlike the way former tennis champion Andy Roddick used Twitter last fall during the US Open. Roddick broadcast live from the tournament on Periscope, offering his perspective on the match and taking questions from viewers. When Twitter approached #twitterNBAshow, it was about finding a “more consistent presence since the basketball season runs longer,” Leroux told SportTechie.
“It was about challenging us in a new medium,” Leroux said. “It’s a different kind of experience and a way for people to react more directly.”
The co-hosts aren’t raking in a ton of cash from the show just yet, but they have created enough of a brand ecosystem covering basketball between their live stream, podcast, blog and third-party assignments that they have been able to quit their jobs to focus on this more full time.
Duncan is a former attorney that started his own blog and podcast called Dunc’d On a few years ago as a hobby. As he made more contacts in the industry by attending events, he started writing for larger publications and then started to increase his following on Twitter, which led to his podcast and then, ultimately, the live show. Today, Duncan is verified on Twitter and has nearly 58,000 followers.
The #twitterNBAshow started as more of a halftime and postgame show, but demand from both Twitter and their followers enabled them to stream more often and for longer. To keep up the pace, they’ve started asking for donations by setting up a tiered subscription service through Patreon, a Kickstarter-like money-raising platform.
They’re asking for a suggested monthly donation of $4, which is comparable to what ESPN Insider charges. For $7 a month, subscribers are given exclusive content, such as a podcast solely for subscribers and Ask Me Anything-style chats.
“Eventually, we want to get to the point where Twitter will be able to promote us more directly and help us to monetize the show and there’d be a revenue split,” Duncan said. “ But until that product is ready, we decided to go with this Patreon approach.”
Farther into the future, Duncan and Leroux envision a future where established second-screen sportscasters such as themselves partner with the leagues or broadcasters to make their service more official, which could generate higher streams of revenue. They compared it with the way esports are consumed today through a series of popular independent commentators who have been able to monetize their streams in a variety of ways.
“This, eventually, is going to be the future,” Duncan said. “If you look at the way esports are consumed now…we hope we can get there.”
As they get more resources and money to invest in the show, they hope to eventually improve the professionalism of the broadcast — perhaps by moving into a studio full time or providing on-screen graphics.
For now, though, it’s the personalization in addition to the deep-dive analysis that seems to keep people coming back for more. At Duncan’s home office his cats often appear inadvertently on screen, giving viewers the feeling they’re watching the game alongside friends in his living room.
“People like the cat,” Duncan said with a laugh. “We’d be watching the game anyway. Now we get to do it with a bunch of other people.”