The NFL was the first amongst the major North American sports leagues to cut a deal with Amazon, three seasons ago giving Amazon Prime the rights to stream Thursday Night Football. The league has used the partnership to try a few things here and there, including having Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm become the first all-female team to call NFL games as part of one of the streaming offerings, which got the league, and two more than qualified voices, some well-deserved props.
However, the other toe dip, going to Twitch, which Amazon owns, to offer some additional alternate commentary around TNF games as well as more and more custom progamming during the week. Two of the most prominent gaming personalities on the streaming service, Tim the Tatman and NICKMERCS, have their own custom channel with the live feed of the game, and are providing their own commentary, and interaction with thousands of fans who may not be engaged in the traditional broadcast, as the game is playing out live, right alongside the call of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman (this past Thursday).
The Twitch streams, as colleague Manny Anekal pointed out on Twitter, set up an interactive community for the games, not just as the streaming channel hosts give their opinion of what they are watching, but also for polling from those watching, for contests and for rewards which can down the road, and they create alternative viewing options for things like gambling data, all customized to that community. There is also no real limit to the amount of streaming channels that the host can provide, which can bring in anything from multiple languages to celebrity commentary to eventually consumers choosing their own voices and even POV for how they want to consume the live game content. The communities on the channels this week…which were at some points in excess of 25 or 30,000, were also interacting with each other, as the channel hosts provided feedback, thoughts and answers to questions that were more fun than deep dives. Oh, and by the way, the streams down the road are also ripe for additional sponsor revenue as well.
This growing experiment with the NFL is a great example of how Twitch continues to expand its reach from what many people think of it as, which is a live streaming service for gamers. Twitch continues to expand its streaming offerings well beyond gaming and is really becoming a more well understood destination for what we sometimes think about as second screen experience, with the NFL being a prime (no pun intended) example of what a rights holder can do when carving up its primary live offerings.
Now of course there are some challenges to splitting the broadcast pie like this. The big dollars still flow to the primary broadcast channels, and diverting audience to other screens can, at least for the short term, have an impact on audience size, which in turn still draws sponsor dollars and activation. However if the feeling is that the streaming audience, especially one that has the wide following of some of the biggest non-traditional sports hosts, is a new audience that is there more to engage with the host, and the other consumers who are part of that host’s community, then you are finding a new audience and maybe pulling in consumers, especially young ones, who might not be watching TNF on NFL Network, or FOX or NBC or even on Amazon Prime.
It is a continued experiment into where broadcast will go, and how the user experience is evolving for some of the biggest and most valuable sports properties anywhere. There will be fits and starts and some bumps along the way, but rest assured the eyes, and ears of every league, and every property, are looking at the NFL twitch test and seeing not just how it is going, but how it will evolve as rights deals come into play.
We have seen second screen experiments come along with things like the ESPN Megacast, and with Facebook and MLB taking some live games, and with Twitter working with the NBA and other properties, and there are other streaming services that are taking on second tier and niche sports for rights deals as well. It is still very early in the game, but the NFL has given many a continue forward lean into the possibilities of alternative streaming channels through their Amazon and Twitch deal, one that we should all be watching, literally and figuratively, to see where the biggest scores will come from.
