American football league the NFL said Twitter attracted an average of 243,000 viewers to its livestream of the Thursday Night Football game between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills, the first time the social media company has broadcast an NFL encounter.
The Jets won the game 37-31 and Twitter’s coverage drew mostly favourable reviews from users and media experts.
In total, the NFL said Twitter reached 2.3 million combined worldwide viewers for the Thursday Night Kickoff pregame show and the Jets-Bills game for a minimum of three seconds with that video being 100 per cent in view. For the game alone, Twitter reached 2.1 million viewers, however the audience was only a fraction of the average of 15.7 million people watching across all television and digital platforms.
In April, the NFL selected Twitter as its exclusive partner to deliver a live over-the-top digital stream of Thursday Night Football games to a global audience across all devices and for free during the course of the 2016 regular season.
Twitter will stream the 10 Thursday Night Football games broadcast by the NBC and CBS networks, which will also be simulcast on cable television broadcaster NFL Network, securing the league’s targeted ‘tri-cast’ distribution model of broadcast, cable and digital platforms.