Twitter wins rights to stream Thursday night NFL games

Twitter has won the rights to stream the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games.

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Twitter has won the rights to stream the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games, the league announced Tuesday.

Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg was first to report the news.

The 10 scheduled Thursday night games will be broadcast for free on Twitter along with simultaneous broadcasts on NBC, CBS and NFL Network.

“Twitter is where live events unfold and is the right partner for the NFL as we take the latest step in serving fans around the world live NFL football,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday Night Football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season.” 

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Verizon, Yahoo!, Amazon and Facebook were also reportedly bidding for the streaming rights, though Facebook reportedly removed itself from the bidding contest last week.

Yahoo! broadcast the NFL’s first online-only game last season, streaming the Week 7 game between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars. The game drew 33.6 million streams and 15.2 million unique viewers.

Twitter’s stock has been trending downward since it went public in 2013, but the news of the deal bumped the social media company’s shares up by 2.4% in early trading on Tuesday.

- Erin Flynn