Watching Sports in the Age of Twitter
Cut that content up. Repackage it. Keep it short.
When Yahoo won the rights to an NFL game in 2015, it was seen as a huge win. When Twitter won the rights for a slew of games for the 2016 season, it was considered an even bigger score. And now Amazon has such rights. Game over, right?
Maybe. Of those three, I’d obviously trust Amazon to do the most interesting things with the rights. And their model for Amazon Prime seems to work with such rights — that is, subscribe to Prime and we’ll keep adding value over time. Live NFL games may be peak “value” depending on who you are.
But the truth is that I’m not convinced such rights are the right way to go for such players. Team tech, as it were. Again, I think Amazon has the best shot of making this offering compelling thanks to Prime — and more specifically, Prime Video. But the reality is that each of these players, including Apple, Facebook, and Google, wasn’t built for a world of mass live sports distribution. So can they now squeeze it in?
We’ll see. But my gut says “no”. At best, I think such offerings will range from nice-to-haves to completely wasted appendages. The latter is how I’m guessing Twitter now views their NFL deal.
Far more interesting to me is if and when these folks figure out how to fit such content into their own arenas. That’s why Twitter’s new deal for NFL highlights makes a lot more sense in my book. In sports, you want to play on your home field. So why have these tech companies been trying to win their games on the road?
The answer is obvious: such deals are what the sports leagues know. So it’s easy to sell a package of games to Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, or the like, just as you would have to ABC, ESPN, or CBS in the past. But it’s hard to sell the rights to such content in ways that are more native to the formats in which the tech companies actually play.
More importantly, such content is what advertisers know. And in ad-saturated searches and newsfeeds, this is where team tech must turn. There’s a lot at play, and it’s all self-reinforcing.
And yet, we increasingly live in a world in which people — and young people in particular — consume content in different ways. This is why it’s not the cord-cutters that should worry Big Cable and the sports leagues, it’s the cord-nevers. They don’t watch Monday Night Football on ESPN because they never have. Because they don’t have ESPN. Because they don’t have cable. And, as is becoming increasingly clear, perhaps never will.
So good luck getting those people to watch 3+ hour games on Twitter. It’s not happening. Same with Facebook (they’re going to try really, really hard to make that video tab happen — I’m skeptical for reasons similar to why I believe Stories isn’t working in Facebook itself, despite the billion-plus reasons you’d think it would). Again, Amazon is better positioned simply because of Prime. As is Google with YouTube and Apple with iTunes — maybe — but we’ll see…
Instead, I’d focus on making the content available in different formats that fit the medium. Short clips. Live look-ins. GIFs. Etc. And highlights. Highlights. Highlights. Highlights. Twitter is and should be the new SportsCenter. Have you watched that program recently? I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s like Sports Twitter with people you can’t unfollow.
Beyond highlights, the aim should be to get a young person hooked on the live experience through a taste of what it’s like. (Hint: not this way.) But you have to realize that for 99% of such experiences, they won’t convert to a “fan” willing to watch a full game for one reason or another. So monetize that attention in other ways — but do it delicately. In other words, not 30-second pre-rolls before a 10-second clip. This is short sports suicide.
The end game here is what it always has been: the leagues going direct to fans. But it’s going to take a long time to get there because the TV/cable bundle has been so good, economically, for so long. And no one wants that to end, but it’s inevitable. And these tech channels may be partners for this new world order, but I’m guessing they’re more like lead gen. Win-win.
