TWITTER’S BIG BET on sports streaming to help boost stagnant user growth could involve major games being aired live behind a paywall.
Earlier this year, the social media company made a major statement of intent in sports streaming when it outbid the likes of Amazon and Verizon to stream 10 Thursday night NFL games.
Twitter paid $10 million to get its hands on those rights, but that figure pales in comparison to the $450 million combined fee that NBC and CBS are paying to air the whole run of 15 games on Thursday nights.
Twitter head of sport Alex Trickett, who will be speaking at the One-Zero sports and tech conference in Dublin this Friday, told Fora the foray into live-streaming sport is not just about increasing regular users on the platform.
“This is looked at as reach and revenue for us – and for partners. I think our starting place, because this is very new, is organic content, like content people can see that doesn’t live behind a subscription wall,” he said.
“We’re proving a new concept – that it works and that people want it. But as time goes on and we go into 2017, we may see other versions of the live-stream experience on Twitter. But we’re starting with organic experiences like the NFL for now.”
He added that these “other versions” of Twitter’s sport-streaming service could possibly involve subscription fees down the line.
“It’s to be determined, but if broadcasters want subscriptions, then that might be something we would look at. “
In recent years, Twitter has found it difficult to keep pace with competitors such as Facebook as its number of monthly active users stagnated around the 310 million user.
The company’s share price has also fluctuated over the last few months after it emerged big tech companies like Salesforce and Google were potentially interested in purchasing the micro-blogging website, however, last week its value plunged again when it emerged Google would not be making a play to buy the company.
Rights holders
Even though the ‘Thursday night football’ experiment is currently running, Twitter is reportedly also in talks with sports bodies such as the NBA and Major League Soccer, as well as cable network Turner – which has the rights to a number of top-level American sports such as Major League Baseball.
In the short-term, Trickett said the plan at Twitter aims to make gains through partnerships with leagues and broadcasters that already have access to the airing rights, like CBS in the US and Sky Sports in the UK.
“We’re looking at a host of possible partnerships across the world in all leagues and from all broadcasters really. We look at this as a complementary audience rather than supplanting any other audience.
“I would love to say that we will have globally exclusive content just on Twitter, but I don’t think that is realistic in a lot of cases, at least not now.”
E-sports
Turner, which is reportedly one of the players in the sports rights space that Twitter is talking to, also has the rights to air e-sports such as video-game competitions.
This is seen as a very lucrative area by large tech companies, with the likes of Amazon spending $970 million in 2014 to purchase a streaming service called Twitch that is exclusively dedicated to e-sports streaming.
Trickett said e-sports are definitely on Twitter’s radar and something the company is looking to stream more of in the future.
“We look after it from various offices across Twitter and we’re really focused on e-sports now. It is another area of huge growth and there is a very rich community of people talking about it on Twitter.
“I think it is an area you will see more and more from on Twitter as we go through the last quarter of this year and through 2017. We’ve streamed in the US and looking to do so more.”
Written by Killian Woods and posted on Fora.ie
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