Thursday Night Football CBS

One of the challenges with events that will be both broadcast and streamed is how to handle the ratings, as streaming generally uses quite different metrics than television.

The Thursday Night Football games, which will be broadcast on CBS (early-season), NBC (late-season), NFL Network and Twitter (full season), will be an interesting case in this regard, with CBS and NFL figures telling Sports Business Daily that they’re still figuring out how to combine streaming ratings with broadcast metrics:

“There will be a number that will be released that will show the reach and the average minute viewed on Twitter,” said CBS Sports Chair Sean McManus. “We’re still working on what those metrics are going to be because they use a different formula than we do. …We use six minutes of viewing to be counted in the reach, and they use something significantly shorter than that — sometimes as little as three seconds. Our priority is to make sure that we come up with a measurement and a metric that is apples-to-apples with the digital properties and the broadcast networks.”

Both CBS and NFL execs believe the Twitter streams — which will carry the same national advertising as CBS — ultimately will increase the package’s viewership. “At the end of the day, it is about how many people on average are showing up and watching. That’s what we are going to look at,” said NFL Exec VP/Media Brian Rolapp. “Ultimately, have we increased the reach and have we increased the average number of people that are watching the game at any given time?”

It seems highly likely this will increase the reach in some regard given that they’re using a popular additional platform (and that those who were going to watch on TV will probably still be watching on TV), but the question will be “By how much”?

That’s where the ratings metrics are important, and that’s where these decision points could get quite interesting. The smaller the time window is, the better the streaming numbers will be (from autoplaying video or curious people tuning in for a few seconds), but the less those numbers might ultimately mean. Keeping an eye on the average length of TNF streams will be highly important, as will analyzing exactly how this combined metric is made.

[Sports Business Daily]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

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