This morning, great news broke for the growing number of cord-cutters across the country fed up with paying out the ears for cable - Twitter has won the bidding war to stream Thursday night NFL games.
Twitter, which is only a decade old, beat out Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Verizon for the online streaming rights.
"This is about transforming the fan experience with football. People watch NFL games with Twitter today," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey added vai a statement from the NFL. "Now they'll be able to watch right on Twitter Thursday nights."
According to Bloomberg, who was among the first to break the news, exact financial terms of the deal aren't available yet, but to put things in perspective, Yahoo! paid $17 million to stream a single game from London last year.
Update:Twitter will pay the NFL about $1 million per game.
The Bloomberg piece also points out why this is a great move for both parties; it's groundbreaking for the NFL, should create a ton of additional revenue, and it should also help attract users to Twitter and open other doors for the dominant breaking-news centered social network as well.
“This should be favorable for Twitter in terms of creating a product that will encourage people to show up and use it,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. “Twitter has placed a lot of emphasis around its relevance to live activities. They haven’t invested what presumably will be a lot of money in owning the rights to this sort of activity in quite some time. It probably will help them with user growth numbers.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell added the following, via the NFL's statement.
“Twitter is where live events unfold and is the right partner for the NFL as we take the latest step in serving fans around the world live NFL football”, said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. “There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday Night Football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season. This agreement also provides additional reach for those brands advertising with our broadcast partners.”
Roger Goodell also confirmed the news with the following tweet.