According to the press release, users won’t have to register in order to stream the game, but surely some portion of football fans will wind up signing up for an account. This may be a Hail Mary move for Twitter which needs to boost its flagging growth in user numbers. According to the NFL, Thursday Night Football’s TV broadcasts averaged 13 million viewers over the 16 games broadcast last year.
One thing that remains to be seen is how they’ll treat GIFs. I don’t mean that in a glib way. Sports GIFs after games are a huge social media phenomenon; after an amazing catch, touchdown, or buzzer-beating shot, short clips from the broadcast flood social media streams. And broadcasters and sports leagues have signaled they don’t like it, coming out aggressively against the use of their copyrighted material.
Last year the NFL, along with the NCAA and UFC, filed a number of DMCA requests to get GIFs and Vines of games taken down. Those requests led to the suspension of several Twitter accounts, including those of Gawker Media sports blog Deadspin and an SBNation account
Source: Fusion