So last week Twitter announced it's paying somewhere around $10 million to stream ten Thursday Night Football games this fall, beating out Amazon, Verizon, and apparently Facebook and Yahoo too. I've been chewing on this since it came out on the 4th and I still don't know if it's smart or if it's the strangest way I've seen a company spend ten million dollars.
Here's the thing that gets me: Twitter doesn't make anything. It doesn't have a cable box, it doesn't have a set-top app people already open on a Sunday afternoon out of habit, it has a timeline that's mostly people yelling about whatever's trending. And now for one night a week this fall, that timeline is supposed to also be a football broadcast. No subscription, no login, just open the app or the website and watch, same as you'd watch a Vine loop except it's Andy Dalton throwing an interception.
I don't have cable. Haven't for about two years now, ever since I moved and just never bothered hooking it back up, and I've made my peace with the tradeoffs: no live sports unless I'm at a bar or mooching a login off my brother. So in theory this is exactly the kind of thing that should get me excited. A company I already use handing me football for free, no extra app, no extra password. And yet my first reaction wasn't "great, finally" it was "please dont let this be the thing that makes the Twitter app even more sluggish than it already is." Because it already chokes on me sometimes just refreshing a normal timeline during a big live event. I remember trying to follow along during March Madness a couple weeks back and the app was dropping tweets, reordering things, generally acting like it forgot how a timeline works. Now imagine that plus a video stream plus however many people are simultaneously tweeting angry things about a missed field goal.
The other angle nobody's really talking about is that this is Twitter buying itself a reason to exist for a night. The company's stock has been rough, growth has stalled out, and there's been a steady drumbeat of "is Twitter even still a thing" pieces for a year now. Ten million bucks for ten broadcasts is nothing next to what CBS or NBC pays for a full Thursday night football package, so this isn't really about the rights fee. It's about proving Twitter can be a place you go for something other than doomscrolling during a plane delay. I get the logic. Im just not sure a football stream fixes a product problem, which is that half the people I know who used to check Twitter constantly now mostly just lurk.
Small tangent, but this is also the same month Google's Gmail team decided April Fools jokes and a button that fires off an actual permanent email in one tap don't mix, and I'm still a little bitter about it honestly. The Mic Drop thing sent a bunch of people's replies out with a Minion gif attached whether they meant to add one or not, and at least one person reportedly torched a job opportunity because of it. Ive used Gmail since it was invite-only back in like 2005 and that whole week was the first time I actually worried about hitting send on anything. They pulled the feature fast, credit where it's due, but man. Read the room.
Anyway, back to the football thing. If the stream actually works — if it doesn't buffer every time somebody throws a deep ball, if the app doesn't fall over under the load — I think this could genuinely be a nice preview of where live TV goes next. Cord cutters like me are the target audience whether we admit it or not. But if it's choppy, or the app can't keep up with its own comment section, it's going to be the kind of thing that gets mocked in gifs for a month and then quietly not renewed next season. Ten million dollars says Twitter thinks it's the former. I'm genuinely fifty-fifty, and I don't say that about much these days, I usually have a pretty strong opinion one way or the other. This one I actually want to watch play out.
We'll know come September, I guess. Circling back to this one in the fall feels like the right move.