Twitter becomes a broadcaster with NFL deal

Twitter staked its claim as a sports broadcaster on Tuesday, with reports it had won the rights to show Thursday night American football games online.

The social media service had come under criticism recently for declining activity among users and an apparent unwillingness to innovate beyond its trademark short ‘tweet’ product.

But Bloomberg quoted an unnamed person as saying the firm had beaten out other media giants, including telco Verizon Communications, Yahoo! and Amazon. It was understood Facebook dropped out of the bidding last week.

The National Football League remained the most popular national sport, though its controllers were becoming aware of the increasing prevalence of ‘cord-cutting’ - households shunning expensive cable television in favour of terrestrial broadcasts and streaming.

Twitter shares were up by almost 1% in early trading.

Accendo Markets research analyst Augustin Eden said the deal could have two potential benefits for Twitter.

“Firstly, the platform could grow its essential user base once more by tempting sports fans away from costly TV subscriptions.

“Secondly, and more importantly for Twitter as a publicly traded company, it’s an inroad for ‘acceptable advertising.’ Besides the fact that the sport is always the warm-up for the main act that is the ad break, this represents Twitter providing a service to users for which they must expect to pay.”

Precise terms of the deal weren’t available, although NFL rights had not come cheap in recent years. Yahoo reportedly paid $17m to stream a game from London in 2015, and the CBS and NBC television networks in the US paid around $45m per Thursday night game for the 2016-17 season.

Both Twitter and the NFL were yet to comment on the deal.