NFL: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon interested in the rights to "Thursday Night Football"

The social networks Twitter and Facebook, the US e-commerce group Amazon, and Google's YouTube video sharing platform have submitted bids to acquire the digital rights the games of the "Thursday Night Football" (American football on Thursday night) package of the NFL for the 2017 season, according to the American specialised website Recode on 23/03/2017. The awarding of the package is expected by the end of April 2017.

The social network Twitter acquired the digital broadcasting rights for 10 of the potential 18 games of the 2016 season "Thursday Night Fooball" package, on 05/04/2016. Twitter also broadcasts the highlights of these games and broadcasts the pre-game programming on its subsidiary Periscope, the live video streaming application. Twitter reportedly paid $10m for these rights (€8.7m at the time). "The 10 games in 2016 drew an average of 3.5 million unique visitors (per game)," said Twitter in its report for the fourth quarter of 2016, which, according to Recode, would correspond to average audience of "a couple hundred thousand" per game if counted over the length of…