When the Twitter Crowd went bananas

Twitter made history last Thursday night when it live-streamed an NFL game to most of the world for free. It was a bold move for Twitter.

Twitter’s stock jumped more than four percent in value on Friday as users praised the stream’s impressive visual and audio quality. At any given minute during the game, the number of viewers on Twitter was — 243,000 — with viewers watching it on Twitter for an average total of 22 minutes. The stream displayed tweets about the game in real time, and most of the tweets were rave reviews.

With millennials pushing new content consumption forward, Twitter is doing everything to stay in front of it and get the technology right.

Indeed, it is a new world for the NFL, and it is changing by the minute. The league is responding by launching social media initiatives to offer fans new ways to consume the game on various platforms.

It is great to have the real time pulse of a fan. Overall, the experience seemed to go well. The NFL games are surely a big score for Twitter’s brand, and help to position it as what it clearly wants to be: the go-to “second screen” for people watching or following a sports event.

Twitter’s live stream looked crystal clear. That’s no surprise: Bam Tech, the video arm of Major League Baseball, provided the back-end streaming technology. Bam Tech has done the same for platforms like HBO Now, WWE and PGA Tour, and it’s the reason Disney recently took a 33% stake in Bam Tech for $1 billion.

Throughout this year, company has announced a series of live streaming partnerships with NFL, MLB, NBA, Bloomberg News and others as it pivots from being only a social network to a destination for video content.

Twitter will live stream a total of 10 “Thursday Night Football” contests this season. Twitter’s arrangement with the NFL comes as sports fans increasingly rely on the internet to watch video at the expense of traditional cable and satellite connections. Many already use Twitter to discuss events as they happen.

This sets the stage for some complex decisions advertisers will make as they begin to explore where to focus efforts and their ad dollars. Twitter may be able to sell ads for a niche audience of that size. In the long run, however, one has to question whether it would be worth the investment.