The "low viewership turnout" on Twitter's debut with "Thursday Night Football" compared with traditional TV "suggests that it may still take some time for people to get used to watching games on the go," according to Koh & Bruell of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. But Twitter's live stream of Jets-Bills "went off without a glitch Thursday night." An average of 243,000 viewers per minute watched the game. That figure is "lower than the 2.36 million people per minute" that Yahoo reported for its stream of Jaguars-Bills on a Sunday morning last October, but that game "automatically played across Yahoo's properties." Twitter reported that viewers of its stream "watched an average of 22 minutes of game action." The NFL said that figure was "nearly in line with the 25-minute average digital viewership of the game across Twitter and digital offerings" from Verizon, NFL Network and CBS. The league added that 2.1 million unique viewers "tuned into the live game." Positive reviews "may help win over marketers who were on the fence about Twitter's live-streaming ad pitch" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 9/17). ADWEEK's Jason Lynch noted the game had an "average digital audience of 314,000 per minute," including viewers streaming on Twitter, NFL Mobile, Watch NFL Network and authenticated users on CBS Digital platforms (ADWEEK.com, 9/16).
SPOILER ALERT: AD AGE's Anthony Crupi noted there was a "45-second lag between what viewers saw on their TV sets and what was streaming on Twitter." It is a "propellerhead issue, having to do with satellite relay and encoding and buffering, and there's not much that anyone can really do about it" (ADAGE.com, 9/16). In N.Y., James Covert noted as a result of the lag, fans were "bombarded with spoiler tweets" in the seconds ahead of Bills QB Tyrod Taylor's first quarter 84-yard TD pass to WR Marquise Goodwin (N.Y. POST, 9/17).
ALL EYES ON ME: CNBC's Melissa Lee said Twitter is "getting rave reviews" for last Thursday night's live stream. Lee also asked if this could be a "game-changer for the stock" of the company. Nomura Securities Managing Dir Anthony DiClemente said, "If you're a media company ... your eyes are open." DiClemente: "The winner is the content owner, the NFL. They found a way to extend the value of the NFL ... to an audience that was previously unreached" ("Power Lunch," CNBC, 9/16). The WALL STREET JOURNAL's Jason Gay writes the streaming experiment was "so fast and fluid that it earned wide praise around the internet." There are other live sports streaming technologies out there, but "this one was easy to use, very accessible and free." The NFL on Twitter "resembled an 'iPod moment' -- one of those times when a pre-existing technology has been simplified to the point where it’s so easy and intuitive that basically anyone can enjoy it." Gay: "I am very interested in what it means for live sports" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 9/19).
