Twitter Serves Up Live Sports With Wimbledon
Twitter gave us all a sneak preview of how Thursday Night Football may work when they announces that they will be live streaming from Wimbledon. Twitter partnered with the tournament and ESPN to create a dedicated page to house a stream of all conversation around the matches and a high quality high quality live stream of commentary on the matches (but not the matches themselves). This stream works on both mobile and the web and is also available via ESPN’s apps. Twitter, which does not currently have an app on any of connected devices like Roku or Apple TV, is not streaming the match onto larger screens. This may change between now and kickoff of the first Thursday Night game, but it is interesting to see how Twitter is presenting the matches.
As a test case for football, this is encouraging. The desktop version has a high quality stream of the match accompanied by built in sponsorship modules. The tweet stream could use some curation, as it currently shows tweets from all users. I don’t necessarily want to know what a regular user has to say about the match, I’d prefer a stream of content from analysts and other people who know what they’re talking about. Ideally come the regular season, the app will have multiple Twitter streams for each team and commentators along with the general stream.There’s also the opportunity to extend the broadcast onto Twitter’s other platforms. There are no Periscope streams highlighted for the matches, something reports have claimed Twitter is going to take advantage of for the NFL. There were individual streams, but none from the tournament itself. There were also no ad breaks. And of course, it would be nice to see the actual matches themselvesLooking ahead to September 15, Twitter has a lot of work ahead of it to get ready for primetime, but what it served up at Wimbledon is an encouraging start as we get ready for some football.