Twitter paid a reported $10 million for the rights to live stream NFL broadcasts, and now we have an idea as to what that will look like. The social network is now livecasting its first live sports event, Wimbledon, using an ESPN feed. The company emphasized, however, that it’s using the world’s most popular tennis tournament as a trial run. “This livestream is an extremely early and incomplete test experience, and we’ll be making lots of improvements before we launch it in its final form,” the company said in a statement to Recode.
That said, the quality of the stream looks good, as several Twitter users have observed (a frame grab is shown above). For now, though, it’s just a basic feed accompanied by the #Wimbledon Twitter stream. While Twitter intends to sell ads for its NFL livestreams, there are no signs of them for Wimbledon, either in the video or feed beside it. The stream doesn’t appear to be geolocked for now, either, because it’s working fine for me here in France.
Live @ Wimbledon – Day 9. Watch LIVE now: https://t.co/JI7WEdvcQQ … #Wimbledon
— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 6, 2016
Twitter hasn’t said how much its paying Wimbledon or ESPN to broadcast the feed. While it’s an unusual place to catch sports, folks love to tweet during sporting events and even shows like Game of Thrones, so it makes some sense to have the video in the same place. Anyway, the social network needs to try different things, because despite having hundreds of millions of users, it’s still losing money.
Source: Twitter