Week in Review: Twitter Launched Their NFL Live Streams Last Night; Is Netflix Finally Getting Real About Content Costs?
- Twitter Launched Their NFL Live Streams Last Night, And, Well, Yeah….
The Jets crushed the Bills in the first game broadcast (live cast?) on Twitter and the results were decidedly mixed.The broadcast was fine—it actually looked beautiful on our laptop. Trying it via 4G on mobile got us a few temporary glitches (jagged screen) and the realization that watching football on an iPhone was severely suboptimal. The Twitter broadcast was about a minute or so behind the TV broadcast too, but that wasn’t a huge issue.What was an issue though, was that there was nothing about the broadcast that would make someone want to sign up for Twitter, which was, after all, the goal of obtaining the rights to the games.There was (an obviously cleaned-up and hand-edited) feed below the game, but if you actually wanted to watch the game, you made the screen full size, which then made the tweet stream go away.If anything, the tweet stream probably turned more people off to Twitter, as it was mostly a bunch of banal commentary (“great catch!” “Come on Bills!”) from total strangers, the exact rap that Twitter’s spent years trying to overcome.That meant there wasn’t much reason to watch on Twitter, beyond maybe, the ease with which you could access the game—no authentication, no logging in to Twitter. (But CBS and NBC are free broadcast networks and viewers don’t need to authenticate there either.) Why It MattersTwitter has bet the farm on live streaming with the express hopes that it will reinvigorate the faltering platform and spur new users to sign up.But UX matters, as our colleague Jesse Redniss pointed out several months ago when the deal was announced. How do you keep the Twitter feed and the game on at the some time? (Turns out you don’t, at least not in the current iteration.) And even more importantly, how do you make that feed feel like something a non-user would want to be part of. (Turns out you don’t do that either.)Bottom line: it seems unlikely that Twitter will be getting a significant course correction from their broadcasts if left as is. What You Need To Do About ItIf you’re a brand, an ad agency or a network, you need to continue to be skeptical about Twitter, it’s bogus MAU numbers and its chances for future success, while bearing in mind that it continues to have influence far beyond its numbers thanks to the media’s obsession with it.If you’re Twitter, you need to get your act together. Do something with the feed—let users see their own feeds, have an “experts only” feed, a local feed, a Jets Fans Only feed, polls and quizzes on the bottom third of the screen during commercial breaks.Something-something to show people why they might want to check out this Twitter thing.Because dudes, the FailWhale, she’s right behind you and she hasn’t had a lot to eat.
- Is Netflix Finally Getting Real About Content Costs?
Very interesting piece in Vulture this week about Netflix’s cancellation of it’s Emmy-nominated show Bloodlines. The article lays out the financials behind Netflix content acquisition schemes (TLDR: they overpay and provide guarantees) and posits that the quarter billion dollars Netflix likely spent on production costs for 33 episodes of Bloodlines is now being seen as over the top. (Pun intended.) Why It MattersThe rap on Netflix has long been that their content acquisition costs are unsustainable, that they are based on unrealistic subscriber growth numbers, and that the chickens will soon come home to roost as the model collapses when sub growth slows down.So the fact that Netflix seems to be taking a more realistic view of content costs is a good sign, though given the extremely lackluster subscriber growth reported last quarter (just over 100K new subs in the U.S.!) it may be a case of too little, too late. What You Need To Do About ItIf you’re a network that buys content, take a look at Netflix's deal structures and figure out how that might affect you/what you can learn from it. If you’re anyone else in the industry, just get out the popcorn and enjoy the show. And be glad that Netflix won’t be eating up the entire industry anytime soon, because as we all know, monopolies suck.
TV[R]EV is written, curated and incubated by the BRaVe Ventures team. Find TV[R]EV on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the newsletter to stay up to date on the TV[R]EVOLUTION.
