What I believe about the 2016 Cleveland Indians
April 5, 2016WFNY’s 2016 NFL Draft Coverage: Joe Gilbert’s Top Five Offensive Tackles
April 5, 2016The NFL just added another bird logo to its stable thanks to a Thursday Night Football partnership with Twitter. Cord cutting just got a *little* bit easier.
One of my favorite moments of the 2015 NFL season—wherein being a Browns fan provides little in the way of options—was the morning of October 25. An otherwise innocuous morning in the middle of an NFL season, the Browns were getting set to have their asses handed to them by the St. Louis Rams. But while this stretching and preparation was taking place, the Bills and Jaguars were playing a game in England, providing NFL fans with football from the moment they woke up until the moment they went to bed. As fans were waking up and realizing that there was a 9:30 a.m. kickoff, the anxiety that littered Twitter was palpable and borderline humorous.
You see, the game was not being broadcast on televisions; it was being streamed live at Yahoo! Sports, the first such stream of the league’s ever-evolving distribution landscape. The irony, of course, was that folks were using a litany of computer-based devices, be they handheld or lap-bound to voice their confusion and, in some cases, anger. Yet had they simply entered a different URL into their taskbar, they’d be watching the very game they were complaining about.
As we mentioned that next morning, the product was terrific. The quality was gorgeous, the response was flawless. This way of watching games, be it on phones, tablets or streaming services, was undoubtedly the future. And it appears that, with multiple announcements on Tuesday morning, the future is indeed here. ((It should be noted that I also watched both Final Four games on my iPad on Saturday night and it was an excellent, user-friendly experience.))
According to initial reports from Bloomberg, later confirmed by the NFL and multiple other outlets, Thursday Night Football is headed from the NFL Network to streaming, and the winner of these rights is none other than Twitter, the micro-blogging platform known previously for breaking news, dress debates and photoshopped images of Michael Jordan’s crying face on various non-Jordan bodies.
Take a look:
Twitter Inc., making a strategic push into online programming, won a deal to show Thursday night National Football League games online.
The social-media company was said to have bid against a slate of heavyweights including Verizon Communications Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Facebook Inc. dropped out of the contest last week, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions who asked not to be named because the talks were private. Twitter will stream 10 Thursday night football games to the public for free, while they are also shown on NBC, CBS and the NFL Network, the NFL said in a statement Tuesday.
The deal gives Twitter 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. The NFL, aware that a growing number of households are comfortable streaming video over the Internet, is using the digital rights for Thursday night games to reach so-called cord-cutters, as former cable-TV subscribers are known. The NFL has streamed selected games, but this is its first season-long streaming deal and a high-profile foray into live programming for Twitter.
Some quick details before you freak out: Twitter will reportedly only stream 10 games. These games will also be on television (NFL Network, of course), so you still have the option. For now, anyway. This is undoubtedly an experiment that will be more prevalent in a few years, but the future is coming a lot quicker than some would prefer.
Thursday Night Football being the foray into season-long streaming makes sense. It’s the least watched of the three main days, and this gives the league five years to fine-tune distribution before their contracts end in 2021. Twitter, meanwhile, is a surprising entrant into this arena as Yahoo! had already entered (and executed) within the space. The goal, obviously, is to keep viewers on the medium where they can not only engage, but view the source of said engagement. Yahoo! had means for the distribution, but the commentary was still taking place on Twitter. With this deal, it’s a one-stop shop. It will now be up to Twitter to ensure that their quality is up to par, if not better than what fans were given last October. An app that allows folks to watch through their network-based streaming devices (like Apple TV) would be a huge step in the right direction.
Yahoo!, however, is not left holding the bag. While Twitter got the nation’s most popular game, it will be Yahoo! who streams live content daily (as opposed to 16 Thursdays in the fall) thanks to their one-game-per-day streaming of Major League Baseball. Though apparently blacked out in local markets, fans will have the ability to watch one free baseball game per day, giving them access to players like mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Josh Donaldson. One hundred and eighty games in all.
Here’s a look at April’s schedule:
Two AL West powerhouses tonight? Nolan Arenado tomorrow? Both Sox-Yankees games at the end of the month? Pretty damn cool, especially for fans on the go. Even more so for the office-dwelling types thanks to a slew of first pitch times in the middle of the afternoon.
The two overarching narratives in media, specific to the future, is the proliferation of mobile viewing and video. ESPN and Sports Illustrated have swapped header images on news items with video. WFNY’s metrics has shown a sharp increase in mobile viewing. While web-based content has no finite destination, it won’t be long before we’re all traveling through the land of mobile viewing and video streaming, a drastic change from the newspaper-and-scheduled-highlight-show landscape of a decade ago.
For those uncomfortable with change, this is your gentle reminder that millennials are slowly taking over. Millennials are in the target demographic, prefer things occur now as opposed to later, and just so happen to consume most of their media—especially video—on their devices. Millennials are not just the future; they’re the present and the nation’s largest athletic-based entertainment leagues are taking notice.
The bad news, of course, is that this is a change and change will take getting used to. As cord-cutting becomes more and more prevalent, it will never be one, specific item that allows sports fans to join the ranks, but multiple, little ones like this. Those on the other side of evolution who prefer the old way of watching their sports will still get to do so, it just won’t be through their set-top boxes. The good news, however, has multiple folds. Not only will fans have entirely more access to sports and teams of their choosing, but NFL fans will now have several months to prepare their streaming on the first Thursday Night Football of the season instead of waking up in a panic on a random Sunday in October. The future is coming whether fans like it or not. The leagues wills will continue to search for alternative ways to add to their top line, while engaging with their respective fans, and streaming is just a drop in the bucket. It will be up to us to evolve with the landcape.
Getcha iPhones ready.
13 Comments
Was pretty excited about the MLB partnership until…”apparently blacked out in local markets…”
MLB’s reliance on RSNs is killing the sport.
Same here, but you’re talking maybe one Tribe game a month right now. This blackout stuff will also go by the wayside in time. It’s an unsustainable firewall between teams and fans. It’s also worth noting that MLB isn’t streaming so you can watch your team; they’re doing it so you can watch all of the teams.
That’s what I thought – this is just the first step and it will be interesting to see where this goes in the long term. MLB/Yahoo aren’t really doing anything for me, personally, by providing access to all the teams..can’t say that I would tune into any of them. As a cord-cutter, I suppose that I’ll just keep tuning into the occasional game on the radio.
It has certainly done a number. Not sure what percentage of Indians fans know much about other teams (say, the Diamondbacks) but I would guess that it’s a small number. Thankfully, it seems like this is a step in the right direction.
I am not sure this a step in the right direction, as a consumer it still puts the onus on me to go seek games to watch (which I already could do with TBS, WGN or ESPN). If MLB nationalized their coverage ala the NFL or NBA then they can control narrative and push players and storylines down the pipe to me.
After an Indians game I see Al Pawlowski and Jensen Lewis talking to me about the Indians and only the Indians. When a Browns game ends I see Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan, Howie Long and Jimmy Johnson telling me about all the good teams doing cool things throughout the day.
MLB.TV got sued last and settled out of court last year due to blackouts, if they were going to budge they would’ve done so at that point. Without a true, equitable revenue sharing deal there are just too many teams that rely on RSNs to cover their payrolls for MLB to change their stance.
We had a thread going in the WFNY Slack channel yesterday that was very similar. Andrew is in Columbus and wants to watch the Tribe, but that’s continued a secondary market so the Indians are blacked out there. He literally wants to pay to watch the team but can’t.
Oh, for sure. It’s not good now. But the Yahoo! thing, where you can watch other teams and get national coverage, is pretty cool. And the FOX MLB weekends are similar to what you’re discussing, but on a smaller level.
MLB is deliberately limiting their fanbase with this stupid policy from the 1980s.
As a Tribe fan, my message to the MLB is to please, please, please develop a national streaming package/platform that divides revenue EQUALLY between all 30 teams. If mobile viewing is the future, do NOT let the Yankees, Dodgers, and Angels, etc. etc. go into business for themselves. I realize that those aforementioned teams have existing multi-billion dollar deals to televise games with RSN’s for the next few years (or decades, as the case may be). Following existing contractual relationships to the tee is of course a legal necessity. But technology and the marketplace will create their own imperatives. As Scott indicated, media rights deals will proceed in all manner of unforeseeable directions. Do everything you can to structure these deals like the NFL does and make sure the revenue gets spread as evenly as possible!
Isn’t STO available bundled with FSN along with the other sports package add-ons? I’m a bit north of Columbus, but still in that market, and I get all Tribe games on Time Warner. It’s Browns games where I get screwed as the local affiliates usually choose the Bengals to broadcast. In that one case, the RSN’s actually work out better for me because Fox will air both the Indians and Reds on separate channels, while the major networks have one channel each in the market and have to pick and choose.
I’m afraid we’re still quite a ways from cord cutting for sports fans. NFL GamePass doesn’t stream live video – only live audio with video replay. NBA League Pass and MLB.tv don’t allow you to stream in-market games, whether or not your cable provider offers them to you. And this, while nice, doesn’t really make a dent in those issues. Hell, I’d be happy if TWC would just let me stream sports networks to which I subscribe, but while I can stream quite a bit of content, sports are not on the menu. (Not even on-demand after the live event) I’d ditch my crappy, ancient cable box and just use my Xbox in a heartbeat.