Continuing its strategy to sign deals for live streaming events, Twitter has announced a deal with MLB Advanced Media to provide both MLB and NHL games on the social media platform. The deal will call for one live out-of-market MLB and NHL game per week along with a nightly sports highlight show to be produced by 120 Sports called “The Rally.”
This adds to previously signed deals with the NFL for Thursday Night Football, the Pac-12 for various digital events, Campus Insiders for Mountain West, Patriot League and West Coast Conference Games, the NBA for two shows and with CBS and Bloomberg to stream news events.
It’s amazing how fast this has come for Twitter. It now has quite the arsenal of live streaming events and has deals to stream live games from three of the four major sports leagues.
The latest agreement with MLB Advanced Media allows for Tiwtter users, both logged-in users and visitors in the United States to watched the once-per-week live out-of-market MLB and NHL games. MLB games will also be streamed worldwide except for certain international territories.
As for the nightly highlight show to be produced by MLBAM’s 120 Sports, “The Rally” will cater to Twitter users in the United States and include highlights and perspectives from multiple sports. According to the official announcement, the show “will utilize a distinct format designed to integrate with Twitter’s platform, using Twitter-based data to determine live trending topics as well as adding other interactive elements for instant conversation and analysis of the moments that matter most to sports fans – covering professional to college to action to Olympic sports and more.”
MLBAM also has a deal with Yahoo to provide one free MLB and NHL game a week and this expands its base to another streaming platform.
So rather than being a second screen for events, Twitter wants to be the only screen with the live streaming event and allowing for people to tweet at the same time on the same device. And by being aggressive in signing live events, this another way for Twitter to attract users and keep them from going to Facebook which has been using its “Facebook Live” platform to gain users.
But with professionally-produced content from all four major leagues, various college conferences and news networks, Twitter is now conducting a full-court press on its competitors in hopes of standing out even more in a vast universe.
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