With a Spree of Live Streaming Deals | What's Twitter Up To?

Every other day it seems like Twitter announces another live streaming partnership. Just to name a few, they have already announced deals with ESPN, CBS, and Bloomberg. What does this all mean? Coming soon in the near future we’ll be able to watch Thursday night NFL games and political events like the National Conventions all through Twitter. But it doesn’t just stop there, they are also in the talks with the NBA, Major League Soccer, and even Time Warner.

Clearly, live-streaming is becoming a big priority. As Facebook’s live strategy leans toward individuals and publishers, Twitter has targeted the larger coveted events and shows. In addition, instead of going for the exclusivity rights like Netflix and Hulu, they are setting themselves apart with their new real-time streaming services.

Twitter prides themselves on their platform’s ability to spread recent news or information the quickest. However in the past year or so they’ve reached stagnation in growth and engagement. The NFL deal only cost Twitter $10M, and in return NFL reaps in the benefit of a larger on-the-go audience while Twitter hopes to encourage more user interactions.

Now, how do advertisers take this into account? Twitter needs to earn its money back. Certain deals have different negotiated specifications. For the case of the Bloomberg partnership, brands can purchase either pre-roll ads or in-stream ads with the revenue being split between both Twitter and Bloomberg. And in the case of NFL, Twitter is selling similar inventory packages as well as Periscope streams.

It has been reported that these advertising packages are priced from $2M to $8M, and they are likely to rake in $50M all together. Although currently not all the live streams have these advertising opportunities, we’ll most likely see this become a familiar practice once Twitter has worked out all the kinks.

Twitter also discreetly launched it’s first test during Wimbledon and the first look of the desktop version shows a dedicated webpage for the stream. The video sits on the left, while tweets with the specific hashtag populates on the right. We’re bound to see more changes and optimizations as they continue to roll out more live streams and I’ll be sure to update as they come along!