National Football League

Roger Goodell dusts off Twitter account to announce NFL streaming deal

Published Apr. 5, 2016 10:07 a.m. ET

Dan Graf

One year after the NFL live streamed its first game on the Internet, Twitter has won the rights to stream 10 of the league’s Thursday night contests during the 2016 season.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell took to Twitter, of course, to get the word out in his first tweet since Sept. 5, 2014.

This fall Thursday Night Football will be streamed live @twitter so fans will see more of this. https://t.co/s6tbr9FjvY
— Roger Goodell (@nflcommish) April 5, 2016

CBS and NBC will air five Thursday night games each in 2016, with NFL Network simulcasting those games and also streaming them on Twitter. NFL Network will air eight Thursday night and Saturday night games on its own, and those games will not be streamed. The league will release its 2016 schedule on or before April 21.

According to Bloomberg, which cited a source close to the negotiations, Twitter was bidding against Verizon, Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook and others. Yahoo! streamed one of the NFL’s games from London in 2015.

As more TV viewers migrate from cable packages to streaming services, this deal will allow the NFL to reach fans on those platforms. Last year Yahoo! paid $17 million to stream its one game, but Twitter reportedly paid only $10 million to secure the rights to 10 games in 2016.