Twitter Wants to Stream More Sports – PC Magazine

Twitter has been dabbling with sports streaming as of late, and the company wants to do more. According to a report from Recode, Twitter is currently talking to a number of major sports leagues and cable networks—including the NBA, Major League Soccer, and Turner Broadcasting—to acquire the rights to broadcast more sporting events on its platform.

Turner Broadcasting seems like the odd one out in that list, but not if you consider the fact that it has an eSports league, ELeague, that Twitter could potentially gain streaming rights to. And if it did, then it would be able to supplement its “normal” sports with video game leagues—an ideal supplement for the online platform, given that not every user cares about the NBA over, say, the latest Hearthstone tournament.

That said, we’ll be curious to see just what comes of Twitter’s talks. We don’t yet know if Twitter will be able to secure the rights to stream actual sporting events and, if so, whether these games would just be those found on less-popular evenings (like the NFL’s Thursday Night Football matchups) or whether Twitter would actually be able to stream higher-profile games, like those found on NFL Sunday. It’s possible Twitter might also go the Wimbledon route: providing live analysis and pre- and post-match content, as it recently did with the tennis tournament, rather than streaming the live matches themselves.

We would presume the latter is likely more attractive to rights holders, as they probably aren’t keen on having a free Twitter stream compete directly with other offers they’ve made with other broadcasters and streaming services. And it’s not like Twitter is really boosting bottom line for rights holders much. Twitter spent $10 million to acquire streaming rights to ten upcoming Thursday Night Football games, whereas NBC and CBS spent a total of $450 million for the rights to all the NFL’s Thursday games.

If successful, Twitter’s interest in streaming could give it a leg up on its social networking peers. Being able to watch free streams of popular sporting events on the platform could definitely help Twitter attract some eyeballs over rivals like Facebook. And Twitter, in turn, could monetize the additional traffic with new advertising strategies or campaigns—and it would have to, given that would be the company’s only source of revenue from its viewers. Companies like ESPN, which also let viewers stream sporting events, can make quite a bit from the subscriber fees associated with online streaming. We don’t envision Twitter charging users to access different aspects of its platform anytime soon, if ever.