Twitter Expects Benefits from Streaming Live Events
A Crucial Time for Twitter: An Update on Changes
Twitter to target new users with live events
Twitter (TWTR) has realized the potential of live events as a great way to attract users to its platform. It’s working to organize its tweets and post relevant, interesting content by categorizing tweets into popular categories of live events, celebrities, and more. The company intends to do this with its new product, Project Lightning, which will organize tweets, videos, and pictures of live events such as the NBA (National Basketball Association) Finals and the Oscars.
Project Lightning is a new feature in the form of a button available on Twitter’s social media mobile app (application). By pressing the button, users can view pictures and videos of events as they happen. The event could be breaking news or a current sporting or entertainment event. The idea is to create online interest and attract users with relevant information.
Project Lightning will work in tandem with TV networks to bring current happenings to users through Twitter. This is a positive for TV networks who want to target Millennials and bring them back to television. Millennials spend more time on mobile phones and devices than on television.
Competition is intense and growing in the video streaming market. According to a report from Sandvine and as you can see in the above graph, in March, Netflix (NFLX) accounted for 36.5% of downstream Internet traffic on computers and networks in North America. Netflix is followed by Google’s YouTube, which plans to enhance its live video streaming service to compete with Amazon’s (AMZN) Twitch Interactive.
Twitter offered a split in the revenue and non-exclusive rights to stream NFL (National Football League) games. But it lost the bid to Yahoo! (YHOO), which offered a large amount of money for the rights. Twitter does have an ongoing content deal with the NFL to post NFL highlights and share ad revenue.
The introduction of Project Lightning makes the NFL season important for Twitter so it can capitalize on streaming pictures and highlights for live events. Although Twitter lost the bid to stream NFL games live, it will still try to win that bid in the future to stream NFL games.
Yahoo! makes up 0.89% of the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK).
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