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Amazon Scores ‘Thursday Night Football’ Streaming Deal

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Amazon has acquired streaming rights to 10 NFL Thursday night games for the upcoming season, Deadline has confirmed. The deal is for one year and the pact is worth about $50 million, a major increase over Twitter’s rights deal last year that had marked the league’s first package with a streaming service.

Under terms of the deal, games will be available only to subscribers of Amazon’s Prime service. The Thursday package will also still air on TV, with CBS and NBC splitting the broadcasts for the 2017-2018 season and all those games also live on NFL Network.

Amazon has been dabbling in the NFL already — it just ordered Season 2 of All Or Nothing, an original series produced by NFL Films that will focus on the Los Angeles Rams’ first season back in L.A.
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https://deadline.com/2017/04/nfl-amazon-thursday-night-football-deal-1202061650/
 
http://www.fiercecable.com/broadcas...witter-to-make-money-from-live-sports-streams

Here is another update on Amazon and sports!

The NFL is kind of like NASA—they’re not going to shoot for the moon until they’ve tested, and tested again, and tested again.

Jim O’Neill, principal analyst at OTT vendor Ooyala, said that after testing with Yahoo and Twitter in recent years, the NFL selling streaming right for Thursday Night Football games to Amazon is like a booster rocket that will take the games’ broadcast to outer space.

“Amazon gets it,” O’Neill said in an interview with FierceCable. “They’re really looking at this as a brand builder. They understand what original content is, and they’re looking at live sports and saying, ‘This is something new that we can do, that Netflix not doing.’”

Amazon reportedly paid five times what Twitter paid last year for streaming rights to NFL Thursday Night football games. But Amazon has doubled down time and again on what content and services it offers, expanding what was originally just an online bookstore into the merchandise giant it is today.

Related: NFL sets Amazon streaming deal at 5 times what Twitter paid, report says

These options in bundling services and content are one way the company will be able to monetize live sports streams better than other platforms, according to O'Neill.

“If this goes well, it’s the NFL’s precursor step to becoming a true a la carte offering,” O’Neill said. “Maybe on Amazon or maybe another platform, maybe its own platform. I think all content creators eventually are going to go to their own platforms. It’s not necessarily going to be something they build in-house, but it’s going to go direct to consumers. There’s a huge chance of that.”

The broadcast industry is quite a ways down the road toward a new structure where vertically integrated companies that own wireline, wireless and content—such as Comcast and AT&T—will compete with digital companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, Barclays analysts wrote in a research note on Wednesday. Barclays also predicted that Amazon has more potential than other tech platforms to monetize live sports streams.

“We believe Amazon has the potential to be a major disruptor long term relative to other OTT entrants,” Barclays wrote. “NFL essentially used Twitter as a proof of concept last year to validate a new source of revenues which, while small in absolute terms, is already showing significant inflation and more importantly, bringing additional bidders into the NFL orbit.”

Amazon is also already in position to drive up viewership via innovative scheduling methods.

“Legacy media companies line up content in a deliberate manner linearly across time, thereby chaining it together to drive viewership higher,” Barclays wrote. “In fact, new shows on broadcast can get more than 50% of their audience from lead-ins from the linear schedule. Highly watched events like football are especially valuable in this world, not only to drive up awareness of other shows but also in driving viewership on any given evening across shows.”

But linear content consumption is decreasing, and Amazon has amassed deeper insights on individual consumers. The time consumers spent watching live TV went down between 2014 and 2016, while time spent watching timeshifted TV and online video continued to grow.
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http://www.fiercecable.com/broadcasting/nfl-signs-multi-year-deal-twitter-for-live-programming

The NFL has a multiyear deal with Twitter.

Twitter may have missed out on retaining the streaming rights for NFL Thursday Night Football, but it’s getting a consolation prize in the form of a new live NFL pregame show.

The companies today announced a new multiyear deal to deliver uniquely packaged official NFL videos and other types of content to fans around the world daily, year-round, according to a news release.

As part of the deal, the NFL will produce a 30-minute live digital show that will air on Twitter five days per week during the NFL season. NFL Network on-air personalities will host and cover news, game highlights, pregame updates, and more. The League will use Periscope and Twitter to produce live pregame access during primetime game windows and other match-ups during the season.

"We have every expectation that the new daily live show, produced by NFL Network and featuring some of our top analysts, will quickly become some of the most popular programming on Twitter," said Brian Rolapp, chief media and business officer for the NFL, in a statement.

"We are very excited to offer football fans around the world even more content on Twitter from the NFL," said Twitter COO Anthony Noto in a statement. "This new multiyear collaboration will bring compelling live studio programs that discuss what's happening in the NFL, unique behind the scenes live broadcasts before games, and the best NFL highlights to Twitter, alongside the real-time NFL conversation."
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A couple of obserations about these deals.

I do not understand this Amazon Prime deal at all. Jeff Bezos would have been better off getting $50 million as a pile of cash and burning it on a live stream. At least that would have been exclusive content I couldn't see elsewhere. The games are all on NFL Network and on either CBS or NBC. Why on earth does ANYONE need Amazon Prime to see this game? Simply put: they don't. If the game was only on NFL Network and Amazon Prime, that might make some sense. But thats not what this is. Amazon has paid a lot of money for no real benefit.

Twitter's deal last year made a lot more sense because Twitter is, generally speaking, a mobile platform. If I was out, I could see the game on my phone with ease on my Twitter feed. That is not nearly as easy to do with Amazon. I can do it, but only if I open the Amazon Prime Video app specifically for that purpose.

For the first Amazon Prime game, I thought just for the heck of it I'd watch on my Amazon Prime Roku app. Nope. It didn't show up in the list of shows available until about half way through the game. When I clicked on it, it said there was no Thursday night game found. It never worked. Maybe it was only me, but it failed to work on both of my Roku devices. The 372,000 viewers for the game are more than the 266,000 average Twitter got last year, but still a tiny amount.

Yahoo's deal for exclusive NFL games from London makes far more sense. When they did this two years ago, they averaged around 3 million viewers for the game. I have no idea what they got this year for both Yahoo and Go90, but the promotion of the stream was terrible.

What you have to ask about all of these deals: do they make money or provide a viable promotional opportunity for the streaming services? So far the answer is a resounding no. The NFL will likely find it hard to get another $50 million deal from Amazon or anyone else unless they start making deals for exclusive games, or games where the only other option to watch is the NFL Network. (of course with local stations broadcasting the games in the home markets of the two teams taking part)
 
tested said:
What you have to ask about all of these deals: do they make money or provide a viable promotional opportunity for the streaming services?
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This is a good observation. My view is that we're living in the wild west. We really don't know what the dominant streaming platform will be. Jeff Bezos knows he at least wants to be in the game, and he has the cash to play. So for the short term, it's a promotional opportunity that probably will lose money. Bezos has lots of money. No problem for him.
 
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