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Twitter announced a new, sure-to-be-frustrating partnership with the NFL today:

Live Show
The NFL will produce a 30-minute live digital show that will air on Twitter five days per week during the NFL season. The program will be hosted by top NFL Network talent and will cover breaking news, game highlights, key storylines, fantasy projections, team power rankings, pre-game updates, and more.

Live Pre-Game Coverage
The NFL will utilize Periscope and Twitter to bring fans unique live pre-game access from each of its primetime game windows, as well as other key match-ups during the season.  From player warm-ups to sideline interviews, the NFL live broadcasts will give fans the ultimate behind-the-scenes experience on game days.

Video Clips
The NFL will continue to program a full slate of highlights, breaking news and analysis, and fan favorites like “Throwback Thursday” (#TBT) to keep its fans in-the-know on everything NFL.  From gameday to historical content, Twitter is the place for NFL fans.

Derp show.

What people want: To be able to freely watch and consume NFL-related material and share and discuss it on Twitter.

What Twitter and the NFL thinks people want: The NFL to cram packaged, league-approved highlights down your throat while banning all other forms of social sharing and forcing people to watch their coverage whilst being the removed from the main Twitter experience, which is discussing said coverage. Never mind the concept of a 30-minute (!!!) live show on Twitter. No one’s watching that. Taking the TV format and forcing it upon social media is about the dumbest content strategy you can have. Video created for Twitter needs to be, um, NOT 30 MINUTES. It needs to be three minutes. Forget about the attention span thing– it’s just the way people use the service. No matter how hard they try, no one is sitting down to watch a 30-minute studio show. How Twitter and the NFL don’t get this is beyond me.

Twitter, as a video platform, makes the least sense out of any of the online juggernauts that are Facebook, YouTube, Netflix and Amazon. Why? Because Twitter is the platform people use to discuss what they see elsewhere. Rather than embrace their existence as THE WORLD’S LARGEST WATER COOLER, Twitter keeps trying to surround itself with couches, TVs and guest lecturers when all its audience wants to do is grab a drink and shoot the shit for a few minutes. The best example of this misplaced priority is Twitter’s simulcast of Thursday Night Football last year. I tried it out, and guess what I really wanted to do while watching the game? CHECK TWITTER. I couldn’t. Or at least not my timeline. Rather, you got a string of similarly hashtagged Tweets from total strangers and had to leave the game for the canonical use of the service.

While it makes sense to create Twitter-exclusive content, the NFL is trying to control all highlights on Twitter rather than let the free and open nature of it surface the best moments and create genuine buzz for the games themselves. This is what MLB tried to do with video highlights in the early days, and guess which sport now has a major publicity problem among young people who grew up on social media? Guess which doesn’t– basketball, which has let its star-specific highlights exist mostly freely online. The little bit of money a league can make, or prevent themselves from losing, by controlling their own highlights pales in comparison to the free publicity they can get by giving up that fight. Look no further than Joel Embiid and Trust The Process mania this year, nationally, that was fueled by social media.

This is all so stupid.

 

 

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