“It was instrumental [in generating additional interest],” Noto said of the NFL deal, declining comment on the premium Amazon seems to have paid for it. “It’s a really high profile brand and one that has really high expectations for product quality. It caused people to come and see if we could deliver.”
One entity that took notice of Twitter’s NFL deal was 120 Sports — a joint venture between MLB Advanced Media, the National Hockey League, and a handful of other big sports media brands and leagues. 120 Sports began airing a sports highlights show called The Rally exclusively on Twitter in September 2016, and its CEO Jason Coyle said the company’s NFL deal played a role in the decision to do so. “We could see that our deal was not going to be a one off,” Coyle told BuzzFeed News. “We didn’t want to just throw the show out there exclusively with a partner that wasn’t that serious about growing.”
Shows like The Rally — a cheap to produce, laid back version of ESPN’s Sportscenter — give Twitter the less polished, less expensive programming it needs to fill its airtime. Noto said the company will always look for a combination of ultra-premium content and not-so-ultra-premium-content. So Twitter needs Rally-like programming. Indeed, it’s already airing similarly not-so-ultra-premium shows from financial news network Cheddar and the NBA, which is now programming a sports talk show called The Starters exclusively for Twitter.
From Twitter’s perspective, becoming a source of always-on-in-the-background video in the way that CNBC is in airports would be a great outcome. “We think that is a great way to have the programming carried along with you during your day,” Noto said. “Focus in on it when you hear something that’s of interest, but then maybe not be 100% focused on it when it’s not of interest. I did that myself during the debates.”
That kind of video falls into a category Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners calls “Ambient digital video,” which he believes exploits a gap left by digital video services like Netflix and HBO Now, which are always looking for your full attention. Liew told BuzzFeed News in an email that Twitter may have hit on a potentially big opportunity here. “If Twitter can own this use case, it may be a complement to the Netflix and Amazon use cases,” he said.
