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Project · 2024

Thursday Night Football on Twitch – Programming Streaming Live Sports For Audience Growth & Ratings

As Head of Programming at Twitch, I led the Thursday Night Football program on Twitch. Thursday Night Football is a $1B per-year commitment by Amazon and nowadays we take for granted what a gamble that was: will that (mostly older) Thursday Night Football demo navigate within their smart TV, download Prime Video and figure out how to stream the game there?

A little more context for you non-sports fans: I think it’s fair to say that Thursday Night Football is the weakest NFL game of the week… it’s the newest package in the franchise, the timing is weird during the week and it’s usually a pretty random matchup. The ratings had to meet or exceed the viewership on broadcast to prove to the world that streaming sports could work. 

Challenges Promoting and Merchandising Live Streaming Sports

At Twitch, promoting and merchandising a live sports broadcast was even slightly more of a hot potato for two reasons:

  1. Because the main home of TNF was on Prime Video (a widely available but ultimately paywalled service) we didn’t want to publicly make it known that the game could be frictionlessly watched for free on Twitch. We made special arrangements for Twitch to be included in Nielsen ratings — we want to gather Twitch audience that might not have otherwise tuned in — but not induce people to switch from Prime to Twitch or confuse the tune-in call-to-action. Translation: no marketing. 
  2. TNF is fundamentally a television broadcast that’s not native to Twitch. Functionally, we can’t really “promote” a single broadcast on Twitch because most of our browse experience is built around rows of content personalized to viewers — one video on a row doesn’t work and it doesn’t give a viewer choice. But on an even deeper level, while Twitch is a live streaming tool on the surface, its real value proposition to viewers is providing community and connection. That’s hard for a polished pro broadcast that can’t talk to chat. 

The High-Level Problem of Merchandising Live Sports

A side note: Concern number 2 is a Twitch-specific version of a larger problem.

When you’re promoting a live stream on a streaming service, two contradictions are coming together 1) the innate value proposition of live sports 2) the expectations and value proposition innate to your streaming service. Those things are not the same. For example, the value prop of a streaming service might be “help me find a premium TV show because I’m bored” whereas the value prop of a live WWE match is “enter an international fandom centered on an unpredictable soap opera and emotional spectacle that’s happening right now.”

The programming problem is, how do you reconcile the two? Job number one is make the game (or WWE match) easy to find for people who want to watch it. Easy. But job number two is doing that in a way that brings in new fans who might pass it by — without trading off the UVP of your core business. Hint: Don’t just pin the game at the top of your homepage.

Transforming a Live Broadcast into a Personalized Experience

We solved these problems by building a “Pick Your Commentary” experience. We recruited streamers to partner with us to provide their own commentary on the TNF game. We solved our personalization and community problems. They got to partner with the NFL and leverage amazing TNF video. 

  • The experience could be personalized because now we had dozens of diverse streams spanning NFL diehards, gamers, gamblers, top Twitch personalities, comedians, radio hosts and even Vtubers. With a wide net of interests covered, our machine learning could match the best community with each viewer.
  • The streams could remain authentic to their fandoms and community because each streamer held court over their own stream with its own “take.”
  • This being an on-Twitch experience meant we could capture browsing visitors without competing with awareness advertising that was driving people to Prime Video. Only visitors to Twitch would see it. 
  • Each streamer was also promoting the TNF stream to their own audience, like an influencer marketing program. 
  • There was also a fandom participation element: if other small or mid-sized UGC streamers started broadcasting their own commentary, we could also include that in the “pick your commentary” collection, launching a flywheel of more and more imitation that drives better personalization.

This program made a material contribution to TNF ratings in the crucial early years of its transition from broadcast to streaming. Prior to 2022, we tested several promotional levers and this program contributed by far the most Twitch audience.