TweetDeck May Offer Paid Subscription; Tech Companies Buy More Sports Rights

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Subscrips On Deck

Twitter’s TweetDeck analytics and management service is sending out feelers about a paid subscription. “A subscription business could offer Twitter a vital new revenue stream at a time when its advertising revenue has been in decline,” writes The Verge. It’s not an unprecedented move: LinkedIn offers subscriptions where it extends professional services, like job-seeking and prospecting. Twitter returns real value to many brands – and personal brands – so it’s not unreasonable to consider subscriptions. The $19.99/month price it’s floated to potential users is low compared to LinkedIn’s basic business subscription ($59.99/month), but high compared to, say, Netflix ($7.99/month). Some of the benefits include more audience development tools, multi-account management features, alerts and activity analytics. It also comes with an ad-free Twitter experience.

Practice Makes Perfect

Tech companies continue to throw their hats into the ring for sports broadcast rights. YouTube, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter have submitted proposals for the NFL’s Thursday night games, “the highest-profile package on the market right now,” writes Kurt Wagner at Recode. Both sides are still testing the water, though. The NFL has given digital streaming platforms bargain bin rates for nonexclusive broadcast rights to a few games just to test the distribution effects (and streaming audiences on those occasions were negligible by NFL standards). Only Twitter and Yahoo have streamed a live NFL broadcast (legally, at least). More.

Trimming The Fat

AB InBev hopes to consolidate its media biz. And that’s a big task because globally, AB InBev’s media buying spans eight agencies across all major holding companies. The brand’s goal is to make its media rates and ways of working consistent. WPP MediaCom reps the company’s media buying in the US. So pop open a cold one for this endeavor, because it marks a milestone. A company rep told Ad Age this is “the first time we have considered structuring a significant component of our marketing capability into a more consolidated operating model.” Read more.

Primetime

Sling TV will begin offering a programmatic buying product through a partnership with Adobe’s Advertising Cloud. Marketers will be able to bid on Sling’s livestreaming and video-on-demand inventory in real time through a private marketplace. “It really helps with the supply and demand concept,” said Adam Lowy, general manager for advanced TV, digital and analytics at Sling TV’s parent, Dish Media. “If something is available, boom, we’ll fill it right there.” Related: Last week, former TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson told AdExchanger that Adobe sees Advertising Cloud as a way to corner the addressable and programmatic TV markets. More at Adweek.

But Wait, There’s More!