The National Football League on Tuesday will debut its new half-hour live news and analysis show on Twitter, running exclusively on the social service four days per week throughout the upcoming season.
It’s a consolation prize for Twitter: Last season, Twitter had secured global streaming rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” package, but was beat out for the 2017 season by Amazon Prime Video.
“#NFLBlitz,” produced by NFL Network from its L.A. studios, will premiere Tuesday, Aug. 29, at 7 p.m. ET. It will be available at NFL.twitter.com and via the @NFL account. The show will run Monday-Thursday each week, running through Super Bowl LII in Minnesota on Feb. 4. Twitter and the league will split revenue from ads sold for the show.
Also under the multiyear pact between the NFL and Twitter, which was announced in May, Twitter will simulcast live coverage of NFL Media’s “Fantasy Gameday,” which runs at 11 a.m. ET every Sunday during the regular season on NFL.com.
“#NFLBlitz” is hosted by NFL Network’s Marc Istook and Erin Coscarelli. The show will cover breaking news, highlights, fantasy projections, team power rankings and pregame analysis of key matchups. Istook and Coscarelli will zero in on pro football trends based on social-media data and chatter, and the show is set to feature NFL Network talent and NFL players as guests.
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The NFL plans to use Twitter’s Periscope live-streaming video service to deliver pre-game dispatches on “#NFLBlitz” for its primetime game windows. The league also will continue to produce short-form content and video clips for Twitter, including its “Throwback Thursday #TBT” segments.
Twitter has been hungry to populate its service with a growing slate of live video programming, because it had the potential to drive more ad revenue than other formats. The lineup this fall is set to include a daily morning show from BuzzFeed News and a 24-hour news channel developed with Bloomberg Media.
