Twitter Wins Bid to Stream the NFL's Thursday Night Games
The micro-blogging site beat out Facebook, Verizon, Amazon and Yahoo.
By Reuters •
This story originally appeared on Reuters
Twitter has won a deal to broadcast Thursday night National Football League games online, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing a source familiar with the matter.
Twitter Inc., whose shares were up about 4 percent premarket trading, outbid a number of companies, including Verizon Communications Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to win the deal, Bloomberg reported.
Facebook Inc. dropped out of the bidding last week, according to the report.
The NFL signed a multiyear partnership with Twitter last year to deliver video and other content to fans on a daily basis.
That partnership, which expanded the NFL's existing partnership with Twitter, included in-game highlights from pre-season through Super Bowl 50.
Anthony Noto, Twitter's current chief financial officer, also held the same position at the NFL between 2008 and 2010.
The companies and the NFL did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Bloomberg report.
The NFL said in February it would split the broadcast rights for its Thursday night games between CBS Corp. and NBC, unit of Comcast Corp.
At the time, the NFL said it was in "active discussions" with potential partners for streaming rights.
The NFL will get a total of about $450 million from CBS and NBC for the rights to broadcast 10 games in 2016 and 2017, the Wall Street Journal had reported.
Up to Monday's close of $17.09, Twitter's shares had fallen 26 percent this year. Twitter's shares hit an all-time low in February after the company said its user growth stalled for the first time since it went public in 2013.
(Reporting by Narottam Medhora in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Ted Kerr)
