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NFL Schedule Released Tonight at 7 p.m. ET

April 17, 2012 by

The National Football League will be unveiling the schedule for the 2012 season in a prime time event tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET in a move that also launches the unofficial start of the annual complaining how your team was treated by the league season.

So far the only game that has been given a firm date is the leagues opening game, which will be played on Wednesday, September 5 with the Cowboys playing divisional rival the Giants and that the game in London will show the Rams vs. the Patriots in London’s Wembley Stadium on October28. The Rams will play a home game in London the following two years as well.

I have to admire the NFL’s ability to raise everything it does to a must see event. The league has already the preseason schedule as well as the regular season match-ups, so it is only the dates that are in question at this point. Still that will be enough to draw a sizable viewing crowd.

Hopefully you get the NFL Network but if not I imagine that ESPN will have its full NFL team primed and ready to discuss the pros and cons of each teams hopeful route to the Super Bowl.

What follows is my actual favorite part. Fans complaining that rivals have a better schedule because of any number of reasons including more home games at the end of the season or having a patsy or two to end the season. Other top complaints are lack of Sunday and Monday night games, or having them to close to each other.

From here it is just a leap to the NFL draft, an event in which we all become experts after reading two paragraphs on a player our team surprisingly drafted in the second round out of Duke.

Filed Under: Monday Night Football, NFL, NFL Draft, NFL Network Tagged With:

United Way Seeks to Leverage NFL’s Social Media Strength

February 20, 2012 by

The United Way, one of the largest charities in the United States is partnering with the NFL in an effort to leverage the football league’s huge social presence into heightened awareness of the charity and what it does.

The two entities are already long term partners, having worked together for almost four decades and it has been a common sight during NFL broadcasts to see one star or another stand up and talk about how he is working with the charity for the good of the community.

In addition players volunteer to work in the community one day a week performing a number of services including encouraging kids to stay in school, serving meals to the elderly, and helping to build homes for low-income families.

Now the United Way is seeking to take the relationship to another level, as the NFL’s success has helped it establish itself as a huge presence not just on the airwaves but also online and in a variety of social media outlets.
The charity is currently hiring people that it will call player promoters, and they will be assigned to promote specific NFL players, according to a piece in Mashable.

The NFL Player Promoter program will couple a promoter with a player in an effort to drive increased traffic to that player’s specific social media accounts. The players’ accounts will of course have a United Way message and so it will enable the charity to reach additional fans. According to Mashable the NFL has 4.6 million Facebook friends and 2 million Twitter followers.

Of course some players also have significant following in one or both of these places as well. Steelers’ Troy Polamalu has 2 million Facebook fans and 400,000 following him on Twitter, while Chad Ochocinco has a combined following of over 5 million, according to FanPagelist.com

However it should be noted that not all are United Way spokesmen. It is interesting to look at who are the most recommended accounts to follow on Twitter by CBS and to see how heavily followed some of the analyst and news sites are as well.

I believe that we will start seeing a fight in the future for additional partnerships, both charity ones such as the United Way as well as advertising ones in not only the NFL but in all major sports. Social media is an excellent way to reach fans, especially ones on the go, and it will be interesting to see how the leagues manage to monetize this trend.

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, CBS Sports, Facebook, Mashable, NFL, NFL Network, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Who’s Going to Get the Tablet Rights for NFL Games?

January 31, 2012 by

We all know by now that the Super Bowl is going to be streamed live by NBC, and also to Verizon Wireless smartphones via Verizon’s NFL Mobile app. It will be interesting to see what the viewer metrics are after the fact. But the bigger item on the horizon is who will snag the tablet, aka iPad rights for NFL broadcasts going forward?

I was thinking about this potential conflict earlier today when I read a report from my ex-GigaOM collegue Liz Gannes who was covering a talk with ESPN president John Skipper at the D: Dive Into Media conference. Skipper’s crew seems like it has clear vision on what the Worldwide Leader needs to do with mobile, which as we heard yesterday is the prime platform ESPN develops for.

Inside the industry ESPN is unique since it not only is a network, it is also a content creator as well as a clearinghouse for overall information. The latter is mainly SportsCenter, its enormously popular highlights show that dominates the sports world. But more recently ESPN has become a content creator/provider by bidding for broadcast rights to games themselves, across all major sports and a lot of minor ones too.

While finding broadcasts on TV is fairly easy — you just look up to see which network is broadcasting the game — on digital devices the access has been murky. Verizon does have an exclusive deal to show live games on phones, but that’s only covered Monday Night Football, Thursday night NFL Network games and the Sunday NBC games. ESPN, meanwhile, retains MNF rights for tablets but won’t show the games on phones because of Verizon’s deal. DirecTV Sunday Ticket customers this year could opt for a package that gave them access to the Sunday Ticket via mobile — an interesting twist but as a subset of a subset not really a mass-market solution.

The big question still out there is who will get tablet rights for NFL broadcasts going forward? Right now Verizon can’t offer NFL Mobile on an iPad, which would seem to be a bit of a no-brainer except it isn’t. The tablet market, aka iPad, is getting bigger every moment and it will be interesting to see how the tablet rights get broken out, or whether they are bundled into the overall broadcast rights for a hefty increase in fees. According to Liz’s report, ESPN won’t buy rights without all platforms included:

Since 2005, ESPN has made sure that all its content deals include rights for every device. As Skipper put it, “We don’t cannibalize ourself, we use those platforms to cross-promote.”

After several digital stops and starts ESPN seems to have crystalized its mobile thinking behind the WatchESPN idea, where you download an app and have access to all ESPN programming — so long as you also have a contract with a qualifying cable provider. This is a smart move because it keeps the people paying ESPN the big bucks happy, while giving the cable customers the kind of access that is commonplace for all other kinds of media.

Maybe sometime in the future ESPN will offer a non-cable-customer price to access all its content digitally, but for now it seems content to keep its window open only to those customers willing to pay.

Here’s the link to Liz’s story again. Good stuff, wish I was at that conference.

Filed Under: Apps, ESPN, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Monday Night Football, NFL, NFL Mobile, NFL Network, SportsCenter, Super Bowl, Tablets, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , ,

NFL: Thursday Night Games Average 450,000 Online Viewers

December 26, 2011 by

In case you were still wondering whether or not online access hurts regular-television audience numbers, here’s another data point to confirm that it doesn’t: The NFL said Monday that TV views of its Thursday night NFL Network games is up 8 percent over last year, while its online audience is averaging 450,000 unique views per game.

The 450,000 number isn’t broken down between viewers of the streaming coverage at NFLNetwork.com or folks watching via Verizon Wireless’s NFL Mobile app, but either way the aggregate total is impressive, and a signal that there may be even more of an appetite for NFL content than was previously thought.

With the Super Bowl slated for online streaming, it is the guess of MSR that the days of online access being a novelty have ended and now an online outlet will become the norm rather than the exception. How that plays into rights contracts and teams’ marketing campaigns is something still in its infancy, but it will be a compelling story we’ll follow closely in 2012.

Filed Under: iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NFL, NFL Mobile, NFL Network, Super Bowl, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , ,

Verizon’s Turkey Day Turkey: No Live Games as Promised on NFL Mobile

November 24, 2011 by

UPDATE: Verizon Wireless rep Debi Lewis (@VZWDebi) finally got back to us to let us know at noon Calif. time that only the Thursday evening game (Niners-Ravens) would be on NFL Mobile live. To those of you who believed the Verizon tweets from earlier in the morning, hope you enjoyed those NFL Network canned shows instead of live NFL action.

Verizon was promotiong its NFL Mobile app pretty heavily going into Thanksgiving day, promising free live broadcasts all day long so that you could watch on your phone at the dinner table or maybe while making pie. Here are some of the gratuitous promotional tweets:

Why are you thankful for #NFLMobile FREE Thanksgiving weekend? 5 live games? NFLRedZone Sunday afternoon? That it’s FREE all weekend?

November 24, 2011 9:00 am via Social PublisherReplyRetweetFavorite
@VerizonWireless

Verizon Wireless USA

Who’s gonna win, @ or @? See it FREE on #NFLMobile, only from VZW. Call **NFL to watch. Msg & data rates may apply.

November 24, 2011 10:30 am via Social PublisherReplyRetweetFavorite
@VerizonWireless

Verizon Wireless USA

But then Green Bay and Detroit kicked off, and woe… no live action to be found. My NFL Mobile app was showing some lame collection of Thanksgiving highlights. And other fans were getting steamed too:

The Packers Lions game is not on #NFLMobile right now… I checked. What’s going on @?

November 24, 2011 10:36 am via UberSocial for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@_csquared

courtney

We’ve sent several direct tweets to Verizon wireless reps and the support Twitter handles… but no replies yet. To me the lack of any kind of response or any way for consumers to find out what the problem might be is a social media fail of the predictable kind: Big company (Verizon) takes advantage of Twitter and Facebook as a free way to promote their service or product, but isn’t really “engaged” with the audience to respond in any fashion if things go sideways.

I think people understand that trying to make NFL games appear on a phone is an incredible, hard task. People would be willing to endure mistakes or blips. But only if there was someone to own up to it. Silence is the worst kind of marketing, Verizon.

Anyone else able to see the game via NFL Mobile? Or know if this is some kind of regional blackout thing?

UPDATE 2: Saw this post from Verizon Wireless later in the afternoon on Twitter. Now it’s three games instead of five. What’s next Verizon, no pie?

Why are you thankful for #NFLMobile FREE Thanksgiving weekend? 3 live games? NFLRedZone Sunday afternoon? That it’s FREE all weekend?

November 24, 2011 3:07 pm via Social PublisherReplyRetweetFavorite
@VerizonWireless

Verizon Wireless USA

Filed Under: Live sports via mobile, NFL, NFL Network, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: ,

NFL Scores 500,000 Online Viewers for Thursday Night Highlights

November 18, 2011 by

We didn’t have a chance to check it out, but according to the NFL a half-million folks logged on to NFL.com/LIVE last night to check out a varied package of “in-game” highlights and analysis from the Thursday night tilt between the New York Rexes and the Denver Tebows.

According to the press release about the game viewership, the online portion was not a full streaming presentation but instead a mix of “live look-ins” and analysis from the NFL Network’s various talking heads. From the release:

Nearly 500,000 fans logged on to the complementary online coverage of Jets-Broncos via NFL.com/LIVE Thursday Night Football presented by GMC, which features “live look-ins,” highlights, statistics and instant analysis from a team of experts on-site and in NFL Network’s Los Angeles studios.

And once again, having an online component did nothing to detract from regular over the air or cable viewers — so please, more online coverage! Again, from the release, the stuff you already know — that everyone likes football, especially on Thursday when there’s no NBA.

Last night’s New York Jets-Denver Broncos game on NFL Network was watched by an average of 7.1 million viewers (not including over-the-air stations in New York and Denver) – topping last year’s Week 11 game by 31 percent (Bears-Dolphins, 5.4 million). After two games, Thursday Night Football is averaging 6.1 million viewers, up 17 percent over 2010.

Jets-Broncos is the fifth most-watched game in the six years of Thursday Night Football on NFL Network and ranked as the night’s No. 1 show among all programs on cable. Other sports competition included North Carolina-Virginia Tech college football on ESPN, which drew 1.8 million viewers.

Filed Under: ESPN, NFL, NFL Network, Tim Tebow Tagged With: ,
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