NFL & Twitter Deal Spells Impending Doom for Cable TV

By Ryan Whitfield

Twitter: @RyanWhitfieldNE

Hidden fee’s, annual price increases for non-upgraded services, and horrible customer service. Does this sound like your cable provider? Mine too. Cord cutting is becoming rapidly popular with millennials — 9% in 2014, 19% in 2015 and projected to be up over 30% this year. I wish I could join the cord cutters, but alas I’m addicted to sports. This is why the Twitter NFL deal is huge.

The NFL experimented last year with a London game streaming on Yahoo, and will continue the exploration this year with this Thursday Night Football deal with Twitter. It’s clear that the NFL is continuing to try and pump life into its least popular product with two new TV deals and now a free streaming option. But the bigger benefit is the testing and chance to cure any ailments in streaming early so it can eventually be the way we watch the NFL.

On the other side this is a potentially the vital boost Twitter needs right now. From 2010 to 2013, Twitter saw its user base grow by 200 million. However from 2014 through Q1 of 2016 the user base has only grown by 60 million and has only grown by 8 million over the last 5 fiscal quarters. Having streaming rights to America’s most popular and entertaining product in a day and age where more of us are choosing streaming over cable should be the push Twitter needs to get back to adding tens of millions of users per quarter.

We are all buying smart TV’s. Most of us have Apple TV, Roku or gaming consoles. We watch Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime etc.  If the four major sports begin to offer streaming, I can finally say goodbye to my cable provider. No more paying for channels we don’t watch, no more seeing $30 annual price increases, and no more fighting with some auto attendant for 10 minutes to finally reach an incompetent customer service rep.

Long live the NFL and Twitter streaming deal!

Speaking of Twitter, follow me @RyanWhitfieldNE.