The NFL will be broadcast live and free on Twitter
For the first time, the American Football League has signed an agreement with Twitter to broadcast ten games a week worldwide free of charge. A far cry from the strategy recently implemented by F1.
In a context where the largest countries that are fans of motorsports in general, and F1 in particular, find themselves with exclusively paid broadcasts, it is interesting to analyze the strategy implemented by other sports.
As is often the case in the world of sports business, the example comes today from the United States. The ten games played on Thursday nights in the NFL will now be broadcast live and in full on Twitter. The thinking of the leaders of the most popular sport across the Atlantic is that the social network already generates a huge amount of content related to their sport, which remains limited to the United States today.
With this new agreement, the NFL is opening itself up to a global platform for broadcasting and promoting its sport, as explained by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell: “It’s on Twitter where live events happen, and it’s the right partner for the NFL in our latest step to offer live football to fans around the world. There is a tremendous amount of discussion related to the NFL on Twitter during games. By reaching this audience, in addition to our viewers on television and cable, we are going to allow Thursday Night Football to have an unprecedented number of platforms this season.”
It is, indeed, important to note that this new agreement is not exclusive and therefore comes in addition to the previous agreements with television channels CBS and NBC, not to mention the broadcast on the cable channel directly owned by the sport, NFL Network. Broadcasters also benefit from this as they can tell companies placing ads that the reach will be much greater: « This agreement will also allow for increased audience for brands advertising with our partner broadcasters. »
The announcement made by the NFL did not go unnoticed by the officials of other sports. Chip Ganassi, who owns a team in IndyCar and Nascar, did not hesitate to say that it was simply a historic moment for all sports!
Big day today for all sports! @Twitter does a deal to televise @NFL games live!!! 4/5/16 will go down in history as a threshold day in sports.
— Chip Ganassi (@GanassiChip) April 5, 2016
We can see that the various governing bodies of sports in the United States are increasingly experimenting with social media to offer a new form of content that aligns with these new consumption patterns. For several races of the season, Nascar partnered with Snapchat to broadcast fan-generated content at the race venue.
Meanwhile, Bernie Ecclestone, once again in Bahrain, asked Mercedes to ban Lewis Hamilton from posting videos of himself in the paddock on Snapchat. An agreement with the social network seems quite far off, even though the world champion chose to ignore this request…
With the participation of www.racingbusiness.fr
