Twitter Looking to Launch Apple TV App for NFL Live Streaming

[MacRumors]

In a piece covering Twitter's successful effort to win live streaming rights for Thursday night National Football League games this season, The New York Times reports that Twitter is in discussions with Apple to launch a Twitter app for the Apple TV that would let Twitter's users watch the NFL games on Apple's set-top box.

Twitter has directed [Chief Financial Officer] Mr. [Anthony] Noto, a former Goldman Sachs banker with deep ties to the sports media industry, to lead the charge on live streaming and has assigned an engineering team to create its streaming video player. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, considers streaming a critical component of the company's focus on "live" experiences, along with Periscope, its app that allows smartphone users to live-stream video.

To bolster the effort, Twitter is in talks with Apple to bring the Twitter app to Apple TV, which would potentially let millions of Apple TV users watch the streaming N.F.L. games, according to the two people briefed on the discussions.

Beyond the NFL, Twitter continues to strike deals for other live streaming content, and while the company's strategy for live streaming is not yet "fully formed," Twitter is considering how to bring that content users either in the main timeline or in the Moments tab of the current app for various platforms.

The NFL had solicited a number of companies, including Apple, to gauge interest in streaming rights for Thursday Night Football, but Apple ultimately declined to submit a bid.

Twitter's first Thursday Night Football live stream will take place on September 15 when the New York Jets visit the Buffalo Bills.

Article Link: Twitter Looking to Launch Apple TV App for NFL Live Streaming

 

[levitynyc]

Still no "edit" button and no anti-harassment policy. Priorities I guess....

 

[RakEgg]

Article Link: Twitter Looking to Launch Apple TV App for NFL Live Streaming[/QUOTE]
[doublepost=1471231972][/doublepost]What about AFL. Australian Football League. Gridiron football is not the only game-in-town?

 

[samh004]

[doublepost=1471231972][/doublepost]What about AFL. Australian Football League. Gridiron football is not the only game-in-town?

I'd imagine the difference in money is quite significant...

 

[indychris]

So any ideas how this twitter feed will work? Will they host commercials just like a broadcast? I wonder if they'll be any type of option for a commercial-free stream for a subscription fee?

 

[OriginalMacRat]

Twitter continues to strike deals for other live streaming content, and while the company's strategy for live streaming is not yet "fully formed,"

And the NFL thinks they can handle the streaming load?

 

[CarlJ]

Still no "edit" button and no anti-harassment policy. Priorities I guess....

I think an edit button for tweets is a non-starter. They're necessarily short, you can post a newer one. A machine can't tell if a tweet is being edited to only fix a typo, vs. changing the meaning. If they allowed editing, you'd have endless cases of folks getting hundreds or thousands of likes/retweets and then editing their tweet to "Retweet if you like Hitler and Satan!" or some variation. Think of how much fun that would be, say, in the political arena.

Agreed on anti-harassment. They need to be doing more than they are.

That said, this... this looks like Twitter "pivoting", trying to use their name recognition to make themselves into a media company instead of a text-message-broadcasting service (since it's hard to make money off the latter).
[doublepost=1471233586][/doublepost]

And the NFL thinks they can handle the streaming load?

Maybe Twitter's plan is just to send one guy with an iPhone to sit in the stands and use Periscope to broadcast it.

 

[drumcat]

I, for one, appreciate the sense of irony MacRumors used in selecting a picture from the ColorBlindBowl game.

 

[Jakexb]

Still no "edit" button and no anti-harassment policy. Priorities I guess....

They're never making an edit button.
And what kind of abuse policy are you looking for beyond their current one? https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311

 

[expectdelay]

YES! MORE CONTENT!

(g dang everyone loves to complain, eh? seriously wtf people)

 

[Phrequensi]

Someone tell twitter there's a NFL streaming app and it's my called My Cable Providers Streaming App. They too have a streaming app. I use it all the time on my iPad and iPhone.

 

[CarlJ]

Someone tell twitter there's a NFL streaming app and it's my called My Cable Providers Streaming App. They too have a streaming app. I use it all the time on my iPad and iPhone.

That works great for you, what about everyone else? Or do we all have to come over to your house to watch the game?

 

[drumcat]

Someone tell twitter there's a NFL streaming app and it's my called My Cable Providers Streaming App. They too have a streaming app. I use it all the time on my iPad and iPhone.

Does YourCableProviderApp™ work outside of the Good Ol' U-S-of-A?

This is why owners with money want an NFL division in Europe and "Joe Fan" thinks it's terrible. The TV rights outside of North America are potentially enormous. It's clear there is an appetite for it, and yet #mericuh thinks that's all there is. Well, la-ti-da Mr. I Have Cable. The world is evolving, and your bubble isn't as relevant as you believe.

 

[macduke]

As a cable cutter since 2010 (instead invested the money along with some other smart budgeting and made enough to buy cars with cash and have minimal debt), I've given up on trying to watch sports. Trying to watch the olympics has been worse than cancer, and NBC won't even let clips of it be shown most of the time, and the clips they do post on YouTube are 30 second blips and many of them don't even show what happened or who won. There was a freaking clip of them showing Usain Bolt walking out and that was it! I'm done. I don't care any more. It's not worth it. I try to navigate all these stupid packages online for MLB and NFL and for what? To get blacked out so I can't even watch, even though I live 120 miles away from these teams? Half the stupid DTV signals don't reach my house. Adding an amplified antenna from Leaf (the premium 50 mile one) ends up causing me to lose a bunch of channels (they get blown out from what I've read online since those ones are closer), while I end up adding a couple I don't care about and still not even get CBS for AFC games which is only 25 miles away over gently rolling hills. So yeah, I've just decided to stop caring. And no, I don't live in a small town and have decent 150mbps internet with some parts of town getting gigabit.

 

[drumcat]

As a cable cutter since 2010 (instead invested the money along with some other smart budgeting and made enough to buy cars with cash and have minimal debt), I've given up on trying to watch sports. Trying to watch the olympics has been worse than cancer, and NBC won't even let clips of it be shown most of the time, and the clips they do post on YouTube are 30 second blips and many of them don't even show what happened or who won. There was a freaking clip of them showing Usain Bolt walking out and that was it! I'm done. I don't care any more. It's not worth it. I try to navigate all these stupid packages online for MLB and NFL and for what? To get blacked out so I can't even watch, even though I live 120 miles away from these teams? Half the stupid DTV signals don't reach my house. Adding an amplified antenna from Leaf (the premium 50 mile one) ends up causing me to lose a bunch of channels (they get blown out from what I've read online since those ones are closer), while I end up adding a couple I don't care about and still not even get CBS for AFC games which is only 25 miles away over gently rolling hills. So yeah, I've just decided to stop caring. And no, I don't live in a small town and have decent 150mbps internet with some parts of town getting gigabit.

It's really sad. I'm in the South Pacific, and our sports coverage is generally better with US sports than when I was in the US. Olympics on 15 channels, very minimal commercials, and not one - repeat NOT ONE human interest story. NBC is total crap, and it's a shame. We get Red Zone NFL on, of all things, ESPN. No extra money. 200 NBA games a year. 5 Baseball games a week... and other stuff like SupeRugby, NRL, AFL, and basically everything. For what? In US$, about $65/month.

I was spending nearly double that. Heh...

 

[loekf]

"This is why owners with money want an NFL division in Europe"

Please don't. AFAIK, we don't give a thing about NFL / football here in Europe. Of course, NFL owners in the US would love to get a share of the football (soccer for some) TV rights here somehow in Europe (billions per year in UK and Germany for example), but an European NFL league was tried about 20 years ago and that flopped.

I am already happy I can watch Olympics here on my ATV via apps. However, iPad => Chromecast is a better experience. Much more stable. For some reason my ATV4 is suffering from occasional networking dropouts. Netflix is the worst.

 

[CanadianGuy]

I hope they handle streaming better than NBC and CBC have done for the Olympics. The NBC Apple TV app is barely useable (light tap to rewind 10 seconds will go back some random time, anywhere from 10 seconds to the very start of the stream), and most of the time it can't even load the stream to start with. And having every event listed as "Olympic Sports" is just hilarious.

CBC didn't even make an Apple TV app, so you have to AirPlay from the iOS one. It also can't load streams half the time. The video ads almost always load though, and you have to watch two 30 second ones every time you try and play a stream. If the live stream fails and you restart it, enjoy two more ads. Fun fun.

Anyway, Sports is always cited as the number one problem with cutting cable, so it would be great if Twitter can pull this off.

 

[drumcat]

"This is why owners with money want an NFL division in Europe"

Please don't. AFAIK, we don't give a thing about NFL / football here in Europe. Of course, NFL owners in the US would love to get a share of the football (soccer for some) TV rights here somehow in Europe (billions per year in UK and Germany for example), but an European NFL league was tried about 20 years ago and that flopped.

I am already happy I can watch Olympics here on my ATV via apps. However, iPad => Chromecast is a better experience. Much more stable. For some reason my ATV4 is suffering from occasional networking dropouts. Netflix is the worst.

London has sold out every game, and they're basically having half a season already. I'm not suggesting "most" people care, but the NFL doesn't care if most people like them. They care whether they can get enough people to care so they can get a TV deal. The sport is important, but the key is capturing what they consider "virgin territory". FIFA's requirement of domestic leagues is going to allow the NFL to get a foothold.

Dealing with a new streaming option is just that much more revenue. Eventually things will saturate, and it's near there now. Whoever is at the top when that happens has the best chance to stay on top for a long time. That's going to be NFL, NBA, the major Euro leagues, and SupeRugby in the South Hem.

The fight for your screen time is on... whether the plebs care before it happens doesn't matter.

 

[mattopotamus]

And the NFL thinks they can handle the streaming load?

Yahoo did a damn good job streaming the London game. It was better quality than most HD channels from a cable company.

 

[springsup]

This is what people don't understand about the AppleTV.

Apple doesn't even need to go after the content deals themselves, and the content will still come to them. They may want to go after cable subscriptions at some point, but so much video content is coming from the web these days it's an increasingly marginal feature.

 

[Enabledobject]

Murican football.
Meh.

 

[mattopotamus]

Murican football.
Meh.

Well it is the largest sport in the USA

 

[SandboxGeneral]

I'm sure blackout rules would still apply.

Perhaps these streaming deals Twitter is going after are part of a means to becoming profitable.

 

[nt5672]

I hope they handle streaming better than NBC and CBC have done for the Olympics. The NBC Apple TV app is barely useable (light tap to rewind 10 seconds will go back some random time, anywhere from 10 seconds to the very start of the stream), and most of the time it can't even load the stream to start with. And having every event listed as "Olympic Sports" is just hilarious.

CBC didn't even make an Apple TV app, so you have to AirPlay from the iOS one. It also can't load streams half the time. The video ads almost always load though, and you have to watch two 30 second ones every time you try and play a stream. If the live stream fails and you restart it, enjoy two more ads. Fun fun.

Anyway, Sports is always cited as the number one problem with cutting cable, so it would be great if Twitter can pull this off.

The problem with the olympics is not with the technology, it is the poor quality of the main talking heads. Actual match commentary using that sports professionals are not too bad. But in between, they way the hosts try to get up racism and political correctness is just too much to watch. We turned off the coverage routinely. For example the big splash of the American muslim women able to wear her hijab in competition. Sports is supposed to be free of religion and the rest of that crap. Or the first American black woman to win a swimming medal. She is a nice American woman who performed very well and should be celebrated for her accomplishment in her sport not denigrating her performance by focusing on her race, like the talking heads did. They actually said, "How does it feel to be the first black women to .....". She was in the top 3 in the world regardless of race, nationality, religion, etc. Why not celebrate that. No I don't watch racists like this anymore.

 

[Juicy Box]

Anyway, Sports is always cited as the number one problem with cutting cable, so it would be great if Twitter can pull this off.

I think it would be a nice addition, the ATV4 has a very underwhelming experience as of now. Definitely not the revolutionary device as Apple put it a year ago. So, a nice addition like this would be pretty cool.

I question if this would lead a lot of people to cut their cable though.