This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

For years, I've been advising BYU football fans who were pushing online streaming as an alternative to a TV deal to cool their jets. That the time for that hadn't arrived.

It's still not here, but it's getting closer.

The big movement is at Amazon, which has streamed some college sports and has been talking to the NBA, Major League Baseball and the NFL. Its first big breakthrough came when it bought the (non-exclusive) streaming rights to the 10 Thursday-night NFL games this fall.

It's the same package Twitter had in 2016, but the price has gone up from $10 million to $50 million. The games will be streamed to Amazon Prime subscribers.

Amazon isn't the only one interested in sports. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all in the game. Netflix is hanging back, insisting live sports are not in its foreseeable future.

It's still too early to get overly excited about the possibility of BYU signing a deal with something like Amazon, although BYU's contract with ESPN expires in 2018. (And ESPN has an option for 2019.)

Will it be worth it? Amazon is paying $5 million per NFL game; a BYU game would probably be worth a small fraction of that.

And, while BYU's primary aim is exposure, you can't expect a huge audience on Amazon. Last fall, Twitter averaged fewer than 300,000 viewers per NFL game; CBS and NBC (which split the Thursday package) averaged about 15.7 million.

We don't even know how many Amazon subscribers there are, because the company refuses to release that information. (Estimates start at 60 million-ish worldwide.)

There's also more to BYU's deal with ESPN than just four or five home games a year. ESPN helps with scheduling, and it can find them a spot in a bowl game. Which might come in handy this year, because BYU doesn't have a bowl tie-in at the moment (after the Poinsettia Bowl folded).

But streaming has made giant leaps quickly ... so it might be worth considering.

Romo faces social media gauntlet • CBS hiring just-retired Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo as an analyst isn't altogether unusual. TV has long valued football experience over broadcasting experience.

But naming Romo as its lead analyst to work alongside Jim Nantz is sort of odd, though not completely unprecedented. The man Romo is replacing, Phil Simms, had only done a bit of studio work for ESPN before NBC put him in its No. 1 broadcast booth in 1995, albeit as the second analyst on a three-man team. But things were a bit different back in 1995. No social media.

Romo hasn't asked for my advice, but I'd tell him to stay off Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc. And emails can be deleted unread.

This could get ugly.

What Twitter is • Phil Simms' son, Chris — himself a former college and NFL QB — appeared on the "Bleacher Report's" Simms & Lefkoe podcast and expressed his displeasure with CBS.

He also scoffed at speculation that his father was replaced because of negative feedback on Twitter, pointing out that all sportscasters are subjected to hate tweets. And then he summed up Twitter as well as anyone ever has:

"Is anything positive on Twitter? Anything? I haven't seem a [expletive] positive thing on Twitter ever. Twitter is literally for a bunch of fakes who sit there mad at the world. They go around and smile when they're face to face, and then they go home and they must be like, 'I [expletive] hate everybody. You suck, [expletive]. I hate you."

Scott D. Pierce covers TV for The Salt Lake Tribune. Email him at spierce@sltrib.com; follow him on Twitter @ScottDPierce. —