This is a huge deal for folks outside the US. Within the US, it's hard to imagine folks turning away from a television and onto a monitor/phone/tablet to watch football. Football feeds straight into the average American's robust average 4 hours of daily television viewing (1). Before you ask about cord-cutters, note that reliable numbers are relatively weak on that end (2).
The original Twitter NFL Highlights deal served a strategic purpose for the firm. This new deal looks like an advertising campaign to buy Twitter some much needed, new US mindshare.
In the US this deal is effectively irrelevant because the host network of the TNF game already has digital streaming rights. e.g. if the game is on CBS, CBS is also streaming it online, as they did last year. Twitter can also serve US customers the stream, but they're carrying CBS' stream, including all CBS ads, so they effectively are providing a free distribution network for the networks, presumably just to draw users to the service (though I fail to see how streaming video has anything to do with Twitter, every service is trying to be everything to everyone).
Outside of the US is where this deal has real relevance, because the US networks often geo-restrict their feeds. Though again it will be carrying the US network feed and ads.
Which is why Twitter "won" this bid with only $10M. It isn't really a big deal.
And Verizon has exclusive "smartphone" streaming rights tied up for years to come, so Twitter can't even stream to mobile (the form-factor that they've ridden to success)
The NFL's past behavior has shown that they want to increase their market. Making football games available to everyone is one of the best ways to get international fans.
There are obstacles that prevent, say, a German or a Frenchman from actually getting into American football, just like there are obstacles that prevent an American from becoming a fan of the Bundesliga. Eliminating those obstacles would do wonders for increasing viewership.
>> Within the US, it's hard to imagine folks turning away from a television and onto a monitor/phone/tablet to watch football.
Not really. So many of us have removed cable TV from our lives. It's not uncommon to see people at restaurants or work streaming live sports on a 4G device. I'll even pull up a stream on my second monitor instead of going in the living room to watch the game OTA.
Does depend where outside the US you mean - Sky in the UK show two, often three Sunday games, all the playoffs, Thanksgiving, and coverage in the UK increases year on year. If you live somewhere like London, finding a bar that shows the game is also trivial.
The real bugbear for UK fans is the often one sided / low quality nature of the games they send over here. In all the time that there's been NFL in London, they haven't sent two teams with a winning record to play each other.
Part of it is also that good teams do not want to give up 'home' games. So we end up getting teams like the Jags with a small fan base, or the Dolphins.
The original Twitter NFL Highlights deal served a strategic purpose for the firm. This new deal looks like an advertising campaign to buy Twitter some much needed, new US mindshare.
(1) http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-Adults-Spend-55-Hours-wi... (2) http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/21/4-one-in-seven-america...