Next season, the social media service will stream 10 Thursday night games, the same ones that CBS and NBC will be broadcasting. Sources say Twitter is paying $10 million for the privilege and will provide promotional opportunities to the league.
According to an unnamed source, Twitter has clinched the deal to live stream the NFL’s Thursday night games. The NFL wants the deal to reach cord-cutters, while Twitter gets a key piece of content to attract mainstream users in its quest to make its service a go-to place to react to and discuss live events.
Evidently, the reason is that Facebook is chafing at the NFL’s traditional ad model, as it likes its streaming videos to be commercial-free. Verizon, Yahoo and Amazon are still in the bidding, though the smart money sure isn’t on Yahoo there.
CBS, unsatisfied with splitting the broadcast rights to Thursday night NFL games, is in talks to nail down the digital streaming licenses for its online subscription service CBS All Access, CEO Les Moonves said Tuesday.
Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of partnerships, says the company is in discussions with the NFL about securing rights to live-stream games and has reached out to Hollywood agents to bring actors, athletes, music artists and others into its live-streaming fold.
Facebook, Amazon, Verizon and Yahoo (at least in a perfunctory gesture) have all submitted bids to the NFL for the rights to stream up to 18 regular season games. Apple, however, doesn’t think the draw is strong enough to set its Apple TV box apart from the rest, and is abstaining.
Exclusives
CBS may have failed to set a new ratings record with its broadcast of Super Bowl 50, but the network’s live stream of the Broncos-Panthers melee established a high water mark for alternative distribution of the big game. The network said its live stream averaged 1.4 million users per minute, shattering the earlier record held by NBC Sports’ over-the-top service, Live Extra.
Each network will air five Thursday Night Football contests beginning this fall with the NFL’s own NFL Network continuing to simulcast the games. Sports Business Journal is reporting that the networks are paying a combined $450 million-$500 million a year for the rights.
The National Football League is flexing its muscles in negotiations with TV networks over the renewal of Thursday night telecasts, not only seeking a sizable rights fees increase but also pushing multiple broadcasters to split the package and agree to potentially onerous scheduling conditions.
A TVB analysis of 2015 Wild Card Playoffs and Thursday Night Football viewership shows viewers overwhelmingly prefer NFL on local stations versus cable.
Begun on the NFL Network and nurtured on CBS, the telecast is expected to bring the NFL $350 million to $400 million a year when a new one- or two-year contract is completed soon.
After a day of negotiations in Houston, the NFL team owners approved the St. Louis move 30-2, with a first option for San Diego to share the $1.8 billion stadium Rams owner Stan Kroenke is building in Inglewood, Calif. The decision ends the NFL’s 21-year absence from the nation’s second-largest media market.
The Jan. 9 and Jan. 10 playoff games averaged 32.6 million viewers and an 18.8 household rating, per Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, marking an 8% increase compared to last year’s 30.1 million viewers and an 11% improvement versus a 17.0 household rating.
The NFL has asked the broadcast networks in the running to submit bids for a partial package, potentially splitting the Thursday games across all of them.
Probably to no one’s great surprise, the NFL is planning to live stream all three of its London games next season, and it’s talking with Apple and Google for the rights to do so (Yahoo was its partner on a live-streamed game earlier this season). It’s not yet clear if the NFL is offering the rights as a package or a la carte.
Regular-season football ratings have grown even as other sports see declines. “The NFL is the only consistent must-see TV these days,” says one media buyer. As the NFL playoffs get underway this weekend, the league has never been in a better position, and that will likely culminate in another record-breaking Super Bowl in February on CBS.
The 20-year NFL drought in Los Angeles may soon be over. On Monday, three teams — the San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams — all filed to relocate to Los Angeles for the 2016 season.
It’s a $600 million question, since the NFL is auctioning off the rights to its Thursday night games early next year, and tech players like Apple might want to get involved. So could the league sell its TV rights to an all-digital platform? Maybe.
Disney chief executive Bob Iger believes the reality of bringing an NFL team to Los Angeles is moving closer. In an interview Thursday with KCBS Los Angeles Sports Director Jim Hill, Iger — recently named non-executive chairman overseeing a proposed football stadium project in Carson, Calif., that would house the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders — said a “real serious effort” was going to be put forth to “resolve something” in a meeting with NFL team owners next month.
One of the last big sports rights opportunities for several years is about to become available to TV networks. The NFL’s Thursday Night Football — which for the past two seasons has aired on CBS via one-year deals — is generating intense interest as the league is likely to extend the length of the package significantly to bring it in line with other TV rights pacts, most of which run through the 2022 season. Analysts predict a long-term Thursday Night Football arrangement could go for $600 million annually and potentially much higher when dealmaking begins in earnest in January.
Robert Iger, whose contract as chairman-CEO of Disney ends in 2018, was appointed to head the proposed stadium project to house the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders in Carson, Calif., creating speculation that Disney — the former owner of the Anaheim Angels and Mighty Ducks — might want back into the game.
The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders have reached an agreement for Bob Iger, Disney chairman and CEO, to become chairman of their bid to build a stadium in Carson, Calif., according to sources with knowledge of the situation. It’s a potentially game-changing move that could propel those teams to the Los Angeles market by next season.
There were a few glitches, and viewership was well below what the average TV game delivers. But it got a lot of sampling and opens up a lot of possibilities for the future.
The game, between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, will be streamed free globally on Sunday morning. More than 30 advertisers will present spots during the game. Yahoo did not reveal the cost of the ads, but a Toyota marketing exec said it was comparable to the price of commercial time on traditional televised NFL games.
Five plaintiffs who have purchased Sunday Ticket from DirecTV have filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL and its teams, as well as DirecTV, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC, claiming that exclusive distribution agreements have driven up the cost of pro football telecasts in violation of antitrust law.
After five weeks of the season, total national TV advertising revenue and value across all NFL TV networks — CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, and NFL Network — is up 5%, pulling in $947.7 million, according to iSpot.tv. This is up over the $905.5 million over the same period a year ago.
After five weeks of the season, total national TV advertising revenue and value across all NFL TV networks — CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, and NFL Network — is up 5%, pulling in $947.7 million, according to iSpot.tv. This is up over the $905.5 million over the same period a year ago.
Hundreds of videos were flagged during Week 5 of the NFL. But the breadth of the Internet suggests that the full extent of the unauthorized use of NFL videos is unknown — and may never be.
According to media buyers who regularly steer clients to NFL broadcasts, the priciest slice of primetime real estate is once again a 30-second spot in NBC’s Sunday Night Football. Marketers looking to hitch their wagon to NBC’s weekly juggernaut are paying on the order of $665,375 per unit, with late scatter buys from the likes of movie studios and telco brands pacing well over the $700,000 mark.
The Wall Street Journal reports that despite controversies, the NFL expects its national revenues this season to rise 15%, to $1.3 billion, a sign media and corporate sponsors remain ready to spend for an affiliation with the league. The National Football League’s 32 teams received an especially pleasant bonus at the end of its recently completed fiscal year — some $226 million apiece from league headquarters, or nearly $40 million more than each team got the previous year. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.
The NFL has told networks looking to land the rights to Thursday Night Football that it plans to make a decision by the first quarter of 2016. While league officials have not put a specific deadline on making a decision, they have told TV executives that they want to make sure the winning bidder has enough time to sell advertising and create marketing campaigns for the 2016-17 NFL season, which would be the first year of a new deal.
RR Media, a provider of global digital media services to the broadcast and media industries, announced today that the NFL has renewed its contract for three more years. The contract covers […]
CBS will stream seven of its games live without requiring the viewer to authenticate that they have an account with a cable or satellite television provider. The CBS games available online can be watched not only on a computer but also on connected TV devices, such as Xbox One, Apple TV, Chromecast and Roku players.
CBS will live-stream its coverage of two regular-season National Football League games for the first time this season, expanding its digital broadcast of football as more viewers avail themselves of mobile screens.
Thursday night football games have done their job for CBS by helping it promote new programs, build up its Monday programming and show fewer repeats.
A two-year content and advertising deal announced Monday expands upon similar partnerships that Twitter forged with the NFL in 2013 and 2014. The NFL plans to funnel nearly three times more content into Twitter than last year, a commitment that will include more video highlights and pictures from games in progress. Twitter, in turn, will use an automated formula to prominently display NFL tweets and related ads in the streams of accountholders likely to enjoy the information.
Broadcast Still Video’s Biggest, Best Platform
For all the talk of erosion, fragmentation and irrelevance, the Big Four remain at the pinnacle of the TV ziggurat. That is worth repeating again and again because marketers, advertisers and media agencies can get distracted by all the digital jiggery-pokery. Here’s just one example: With Thursday night football available on CBS and the NFL Network last season, nearly five times as many adults 18-49 watched on CBS as on the NFL Network across the eight-game schedule. What’s more, in that same key demo, CBS (5.9) and NFL Network (1.3) combined to deliver 157% more viewers than the NFL Network alone did in 2013 (2.8).
The NFL is widening its Game Pass service to more devices, while sunsetting its Game Rewind service, which made all past games available on demand. The new VOD service will be available on Apple TV, Xbox One and XBox 360, among other devices.
