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Twitter has come quite a long way since its budding days as the next interesting social media craze. The 140-character schtick as grown from a silly gimmick to a full-on content and multimedia platform, and one that can seemingly generate lots of dollars with the right strategy.
While those strategies haven’t always worked out for the company in their formative years, ti seems they’re getting a very good idea of where they should be placing their bets for the future: live video. Reports suggest Twitter is looking to have live video programming on their platform going 24/7.
Twitter’s first big step into live video was with an NFL Network deal in 2016 which saw them broadcast a number of Thursday Night Football games live. It was a pretty nice success, with the $10 million deal offering a new dynamic for football fans to talk about the goings-on of the game on the internet. It was so successful, in fact, that Amazon inked a similar deal worth 5 times that amount for the 2017 season.
While Twitter obviously wishes they were able to retain the rights to one of America’s most watched sports, the company found that the deal helped them generate interest for many other content providers in not just sports, but across all different sorts of categories. Alongside highlight shows from MBL and NHL-backed 120 Sports, as well as the NBA, a financial network known as Cheddar has also started airing content exclusively for Twitter.
Of course, not all of the content that would be shown in this 24/7 video world would be quite as lucrative as a live NFL game, but it doesn’t have to be. The goal is to get people talking about events, sports, news, and the important things in the world, and the best way to do that is to draw them in with live video even if that video amounts to little more than a highlight series.
At the end of the day, the goal is to get more eyes on ads, and video has always been a great way to do just that. We’re said to be hearing more about Twitter’s plans at some point later this year.
[via BuzzFeed]
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