“Millennials basically watch everything on their mobile devices and don’t watch TV,” New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, chairman of the NFL’s broadcast committee, told USA TODAY Sports. “We’re exploring the best ways to connect with that.”
So how exactly does it plan to do that? It looks like the NFL wants to continue to partner with services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon to bring NFL content to a new generation.
When talking about last years’ deal to stream Thursday Night NFL games on Twitter that averaged 266,000 viewers per game, Amanda Herald, NFL vice president of media strategy and business development said, “The audience definitely skewed a lot younger.” Herald went on to say, “It was even younger than expected.”
Last weeks’ Thursday Night NFL game was the first to be streamed on Amazon Prime Video. According to the NFL, an estimated 372,000 viewers watched an average of 55 minutes of the game and a total of 1.6 million customers initiated a stream and watched part of the game.
The NFL declined to go into detail on exactly what it plans to do to make the NFL more cord-cutting friendly, but it seems to want everyone to know that it is working on it.
Yet not everyone seems to be onboard with this idea yet. This year NBC has cut off its free stream of NFL Sunday Night Football. In the past it was free on Yahoo and on its own app but this year you need a pay-TV provider to access the stream.
So clearly there is still a ways to go, but the NFL has decided making NFL content more available via streaming is the best thing to do. Well, they don’t seem to have a plan yet the fact that they are talking about it is a huge step in the right direction.
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