Everyone is making a big deal out of the report that Twitter may be working on an Apple TV app through which they’ll stream NFL games. But I think it’s largely meaningless.

Some reasons:

  1. It seems the NFL is using Thursday night as their sandbox for experimentation. All of the games will be on NFL Network, 10 of them will be broadcast on NBC or CBS (five on each), and those same 10 will also be broadcast on Twitter (which was big news when it was announced in April). Ironically, the NFL is the easiest sport for cord-cutters to watch through legal means. With the exception of Monday Night Football, all NFL games are available on broadcast networks – CBS, FOX or NBC – which means cord-cutters can watch on their TVs using either a digital or built-in tuner. So while Twitter’s Apple TV app will be a nice-to-have for Apple TV fans – give Twitter credit for being different – I doubt that there are any self-respecting football fans who’ve cut the cord and don’t have a tuner, unless they watch local games or RedZone exclusively through Verizon phones. In other words, though this is interesting, it was already very easy to watch NFL games without a cable subscription. And since Twitter will only be airing the 10 games that are already being broadcast on NBC or CBS, they’re not really solving any problem.
  2. What was more notable was the NFL-Twitter partnership in general, which will pay the NFL $10 million and allow them to sell most of the ads on the Twitter portion of the broadcast. Thanks to the NFL’s infuriatingly lucrative partnerships with DirectTV and Verizon, I believe this will mark the first time you can watch an NFL game live on a mobile device if you’re not a subscriber to one of those two services, or any service. I assume Twitter will allow you to tweet about the game while you’re watching it, which will actually add value to the whole experience. This is moving the ball forward, so to speak.
  3. Twitter may very well have goals to become the next YouTube or Facebook Live with the amount of effort they’re putting into video content, and that makes Apple TV a logical destination. But, from a user perspective, there’s very little value Twitter would add by putting games on Apple TV, and it seems more a distraction from their core service. Their competitive advantage is being a real-time news feed and destination for discussion of live events. Broadcasting those live events in the app, meaning people can both view and comment at once, is the groundbreaking part of this. That’s an experience you can’t offer on a TV. No one is going to use the traditional features of Twitter on their TV. Twitter, the app, is at its canonical best on your phone. Even if Twitter streams NFL games through Apple TV, people will still pick up their phones to Tweet. A Twitter Apple TV app will offer little differentiation from a theoretical NBC, CBS, or NFL(!) app that would allow you to stream NFL games that are already available over-the-air, unless they do something radically different by overlaying the video with Tweets and such… but I’d bet more heavily on something like that being an annoyance rather than adding anything to the user experience.
  4. At this point you’d have to wonder why the NFL would even bother with third parties, from whom they collect broadcast rights fees but also split advertising revenues with, and not just stream all of the games themselves. We may get there eventually, but the NFL – or any sports league – will likely never broadcast-stream-whatever all games themselves for the same reason why all games aren’t broadcast on the NFL Network now– promotion. There’s a substantial portion of the population that watch NFL games because they’re the best thing on at that moment, or because NBC hypes Sunday Night Football like no other. The NFL, if its games existed in a vacuum, wouldn’t get nearly the same viewership if it didn’t use other channels to promote it. Though the matchups aren’t as good, a reason why Monday Night Football on ESPN and Thursday Night Football on, well, just about everything doesn’t get as good of ratings as Sunday Night Football on NBC is because NBC has a bigger megaphone and reach. So as we transition to streaming, it will be in the league’s best interest to partner with outlets that can amplify its product. Twitter is a good place to start, especially since it dominates the conversation surrounding live events. But for the purposes of discovery, an Apple TV app does little good. People will, however, stumble upon NFL games by opening the Twitter app on their phones. In this way, it will get viewers in much the same way your aunt may watch Sunday Night Football because she automatically tunes to NBC in the evenings.

Everyone is still trying to figure out what the relationship will be between sports leagues, broadcasters, cable providers, social media networks, and other platforms. Twitter’s partnership with the NFL is highly interesting because it will allow more people to watch on their phones and interact in a new way. But the report about the Apple TV app has little to do with that and will have little impact on cord-cutting in general.