Twitter’s Wimbledon Stream Shows Its Live Sports Potential
Twitter (TWTR) - Get Reporthas long been seen by many sports fans as an invaluable resource for learning about breaking sports news, getting real-time commentary and one-liners about sporting events from writers and pundits, and hearing directly from athletes themselves.
In recent years, it has also become filled to the brim with video clips of sports highlights -- stars such as Stephen Curry and Lionel Messi have received plenty of free publicity from the millions of Twitter video views their highlights have produced.
In that context, it makes sense Twitter is taking its efforts to cater to sports fans a step further by hosting live streams of some of the events its users are constantly tweeting about and sharing video clips of.
The company is giving a preview of what those efforts will look like on Wednesday, hosting a Wimbledon stream in partnership with ESPN that shows running commentary and highlights related to Wednesday's matches (but not the matches themselves). Clicking on the live stream page brings up both the stream and a constantly-updating feed of Wimbledon-related tweets.
A screenshot of Twitter's Wimbledon live stream page
The effort remains very much a work in progress: Twitter didn't try hard to promote the stream on its site and apps, and didn't make it clear that live matches weren't being streamed. Moreover, with dozens of new tweets appearing in the Wimbledon feed every minute, the company needs to find a way to filter more interesting and/or popular tweets from the others.
But the setup does show the potential value of merging live sports video with traditional Twitter content, both of which Twitter is capable of monetizing via ads.
Twitter is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells TWTR? Learn more now.
That's worth keeping in mind as Twitter gets set to stream 10 Thursday night NFL games this fall. Twitter reportedly paid less than $10 million to stream the games, which will also be broadcast by CBS and NBC, and it is reportedly trying to sell ad inventory covering both the games and NFL video clips for more than $50 million, with the NFL taking a cut.
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about these deals is that Twitter appears to be paying very little for the rights to stream a portion of the content TV broadcasters are paying massive sums for. While it's unrealistic to expect Twitter to start outbidding broadcasters for exclusive rights to major sports packages -- that would cost the company a lot more, and sports leagues could be squeamish about abandoning TV distribution regardless -- sports leagues clearly see a lot of marketing and publicity value in giving millions of Twitter sports fans the ability to simultaneously watch and discuss their content in real-time.
In time, Twitter's unrivaled status in the social media realm as a hub for following and discussing live events -- a status not even matched by Facebook (FB) - Get Report, which recently launched a feature known as Sports Stadium to follow sporting events -- could also pave the way for inexpensive streaming deals for non-sports events, such as entertainment awards shows, concerts and political conventions.
But as in various other fields, Twitter needs to show that it can execute before investors get too excited. Shares of Twitter were