Twitter has beat out rivals Amazon, Yahoo, and Verizon to acquire global rights to 10 of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games shown on NBC and CBS next season for free without authentication. Facebook was also in the running for the deal before they dropped out a week ago.
This fall Thursday Night Football will be streamed live @twitter so fans will see more of this. https://t.co/s6tbr9FjvY
— Roger Goodell (@nflcommish) April 5, 2016
The service will also offer pre-game Periscope broadcasts from players and teams, along with embeddable in-game highlights.
“There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday Night Football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
The deal allows Twitter to show games to users without requiring them to sign into the social network and stream it on platforms like Xbox and PlayStation. The NFL is also exploring ways to let Twitter stream the games via syndication partners like Google and Yahoo.
[Image: Doug Pensinger/Getty]
