Twitter spends $10m on rights to cover Thursday-night NFL games Twitter has paid a reported $10m for the streaming rights to ten NFL games later this year, surprising many and leaving some scratching their head. The one-million-dollars-a-game deal allows the social media company to rebroadcast the stream from network giants CBS and NBC who have paid $450m for the rights to broadcast the …
I like the internet, always have.
I can see how facebook and google conquered it to make their billions.
I can see how MS and Apple provided OS that made the internet easy and omnipresent.
I still to this day cannot see how Twitter is a valuable thing.
Closest approximation I ever came up with was "let's add a button to my email to make google be able to index it and feed it to the world".
But my emails have to be really f'in short as there was a thing called SMS once.
Actually it's not just twitter, I'll lump reddit in there as well. Half-arsed versions of the original internet, that made it a *bit* easier to use for the newbies - but compared to what came afterwards are positively archaic.
They seemed to capture a bubble of people a bit younger than me as they flew by (late thirties), but are eternally doomed to have to milk that generation as neither those on either side give a toss.
"I still to this day cannot see how Twitter is a valuable thing."
I came to post my thoughts on twitter, only to find you had done so first. The forum rules say that I can only give you one upvote.
If I could, I would give you a thousand for this line alone.
I still to this day cannot see how Twitter is a valuable thing.
I think the business model is: people like gossip, let's make gossiping easy and then start charging for it. After all, this is what drove SMS from being a free add-on to a paid-for service.
While Twitter remains the media's darling, because pithy quotes can help gloss over the total absence of any research, the chattering classes have moved over to messaging apps.
My Twiiter is full of rugby news, commentaries, photos and videos. Most of the many pubs I spread my time between post their beer lists and events, I even get Belgian beer and bar news on it.
In many ways it's targeted advertising done nearly right, opt in, fine grained and correctly targeted. If Twitter could work out how to monetise that without drowning us in traditional advertising they'd have a business model, sadly they're well on the way to annoying ad overload instead.
There also a tiny amount of 'gossip' and keeping in touch with family & friends when emails too much effort. A tiny amount but I'm long past my thirties ;)
"I think the business model is: people like gossip, let's make gossiping easy and then start charging for it."
While I think you're probably right that this is what their business model, this is exactly the problem; Twitter is completely useless for gossiping. Twitter is fundamentally a one-to-many communication service. It works great for large organisations to make announcements to people who have signed up to see what they say, and similarly things like disaster warning services and the like, but it's an unstructured mess as soon as anyone tries to have an actual conversation with more than one person involved. For gossip and general chatter, people want to be able to have a group all talk together while probably restricting it to members of that group; but Twitter makes both aspects effectively impossible.
As for people moving over to messaging apps, they never left them in the first place. Usenet and mailing lists have been around pretty much since the internet existed, forums and the like for nearly as long, instant messengers like MSN and ICQ have been around since the '90s, and Facebook pretty much took over from there. Now things have moved towards phones, but nothing fundamental has changed, they're all just some kind of program to allow groups of people to talk together. Lots of people signed up to Twitter, but it never became the big thing everyone was using to talk because it never made it possible for them to do so. People haven't moved from Twitter to messaging apps, they've moved from one set of messaging apps to another set while largely ignoring Twitter because it didn't do what they wanted.
which is of course presuming they had it in the first place.
So the app of brevity is hooked up to the sport with the biggest ratio of inactivity to action there is. 60 minutes of an American Football game contains on average 11 minutes of actual play, and can take up to 3.5 hours to complete.
"So the app of brevity is hooked up to the sport with the biggest ratio of inactivity to action there is. 60 minutes of an American Football game contains on average 11 minutes of actual play, and can take up to 3.5 hours to complete."
Good thing then that Twitter got the feed "on a discount". And they still paid too much.
"60 minutes of an American Football game contains on average 11 minutes of actual play, and can take up to 3.5 hours to complete."
50 or 60 years ago, American football was much more interesting and entertaining to watch. Eleven men (plus substitutions) played both offence and defence for the entire game. These were fit men, some of them six-footers, many of them not.
If only there was a sport today, where the players played the entire game (plus substitutions), played both offence and defence, and, as an added bonus, used their feet to play the game. I'll bet that would be fun to watch.
Even better would be a game where in addition, like American football, they use hands as well as feet, respect the officials, don't fall over screaming if they feel a breath of air from an opposition player, have the good sense to use video review of key decisions, and play to a fixed game time rather than tag an arbitrary number of minutes on the end of each period. Heck, to make it more familiar to a US audience they could even play with an oval ball and use big H-shaped goalposts. Oh, wait...
If only there was a sport today, where the players played the entire game (plus substitutions), played both offence and defence, and, as an added bonus, used their feet to play the game. I'll bet that would be fun to watch.
I reckon you'd love Australian Rules football (basically no holds barred), or good old rugby league, which has the added bonus of a hooter to signal the end of a half.
I think the point is that Twitter is helping Thursday Night Football achieve its internet destiny - free to view anywhere in the world.
Here in the UK I can watch Thursday night games if I subscribe to Sky's sports channels or the NFL's streaming coverage.
Now Twitter have acknowledged that I shouldn't have to pay real money to stay up till 4 o'clock in the morning.
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