The social network lost some leverage in the emerging livestreaming race after Amazon won NFL streaming rights.
Twitter suffered a blind side hit when it lost its NFL streaming rights deal to Amazon.
Twitter got sacked big time when it lost out to Amazon in a livestreaming deal with the NFL this season.
We learned Tuesday that the social network had been outmaneuvered, after the American football league chose e-commerce goliath Amazon to stream 10 ” Thursday Night Football ” games this year for a reported $50 million — five times more than Twitter paid for the same rights last year.
That was bad news for Twitter, which positioned last year’s agreement as the crown jewel of its livestreaming efforts. Twitter executives proclaimed the next big thing is live video, leveraging its NFL partnership to rack up more sports streaming deals in a dire effort to attract new users and advertisers, while also keeping skeptical investors at bay.
Livestreaming events, especially sports, is fueling fierce competition among tech companies seeking more customers and more dollars. While Twitter still has streaming deals with Major League Baseball , the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association for its 319 million users, its rival Facebook, with an audience of nearly 2 billion monthly users, is scouring for similar deals, striking a deal in March to stream 22 Major League Soccer games.
Unfortunately for Twitter, that means losing this deal with the NFL is akin to watching your team lose the Super Bowl.
“What we have now amounts to a one-year experiment for the NFL, and it makes you wonder about Twitter’s relevance in this space,” said Paul Verna, a video analyst at eMarketer.
For Amazon, this move has represented a coming out moment of sorts, with a marquee deal that overshadows other pro sports streaming efforts, like Twitter’s golf and lacrosse games and Facebook’s surfing contests. Before the NFL deal, Amazon’s only prior connection with football, aside from selling and shipping merchandise, was grabbing the rights to stream the Emmy-nominated NFL Films-produced series ” All or Nothing ,” which follows the ups and downs of an NFL team for an entire season.
