Video: How the NFL Leverages Twitter as a Live Video Platform
In this excerpt from his panel presentation at Streaming Media East 2017, NFL VP, Digital Media Business Development discusses the NFL's social media video strategy in general and details specific ways the NFL is leveraging Twitter to connect with fans with live and near-real-time video content delivery.
Learn more about sport streaming at Streaming Media West.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Blake Stuchin: If I had to pick just a few words to describe each of these social platforms--whether you call YouTube a social platform or not, apparently the jury's still out--but to me, the essence of Twitter has always been about live conversation. Live, real-time. Near-real time, whatever that may be. I echo the perspective that live events, live gatherings are still a great way for any brand, any entertainment producer to engage community and stoke passion. Sports in general, and certainly NFL in particular, is an area where we care a great deal about live ultimately the live game experience, where the inside of our stadiums or watching on a Thursday, Sunday, or Monday night is the best way to be experiencing that content.
We've obviously been doing live for a long time and it's a big part of what we do and then live beyond the games is a really interesting and new area that we continue to focus on. What does live mean for less heavily produced content? What does live mean when we're taking NFL Network talent or a correspondent or a former player and bringing you into the locker room, bringing you onto the sidelines before games kick off. There are a lot of things there that we look at and continue to experiment with because it's such an exciting time, given these new technologies that are, at least for an organization like ours, creating great opportunities, and we think providing new ways to show our fans how they can get closer to the game and experience it.
On the Twitter side, what we were focused on was saying, "We have 192 million fans across league, club, and player accounts just on Twitter." That's just people who are following either NFL clubs, the league, or all of our players on Twitter. It's still a huge platform to engage those fans, and one of the things that's been so interesting about Twitter is that, as it's evolved this platform for live content is increasingly interesting. So what we set out to do when working with Twitter this year was to say, "How can we take the next step on things that we've learned in the future."
What hopefully some of you in this room have already seen over the last five years and what we're going to continue to do is put in progress highlights, those near real time moments, you see a spectacular catch, a great play, a controversial call, you'll see that pulled right away from some high-quality software that enables us to do that in your real time and putting it up right on Twitter right away, we've done that for years and we're going to continue to do that in a bigger way.
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