As a trend, no one has had any doubts about whether live streaming is the future of watching sports. Even a year ago, video streaming services have overtaken live TV programming in popularity within American households, and that is especially true for younger demographics.
With this on their radar, several companies have scrambled to become the source for sports fans to watch the biggest games online.
The latest deal sees Facebook, a relative newcomer in the world of live streaming but no stranger to covering live events, capture the broadcasts of all nine U.S. Olympic basketball exhibition games before the actual Olympics start.
The games, which occur on most days from today through Aug. 1, will be live simulcasted on both NBA TV and the Facebook pages of the NBA and USA Basketball. The broadcasting rights of all of the matchups are the original property of NBC.
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This is not the biggest win for Facebook by means of becoming a hub for sports live streaming, but it is an interesting step that shows a common trend. None of the games are particularly enticing contests, seeing as the U.S. is the dominant force in world basketball, and these games are merely for practice. The men already cruised to victory against No. 4 ranked Argentina with a smooth score of 111-74 on July 22.
Twitter has been the social media network that has taken live streaming most seriously within the past year. Just this week, they announced a partnership with the NBA that will see the basketball league producing two live shows for the social media platform to stream.
Other notable deals from Twitter have been the coverage of 150 future Pac-12 conference games, along with ten NFL Thursday Night Football games for this upcoming season.
While the proprietary owner of these games is trending towards simulcasting sporting events on one main network, in addition to airing the game on some social media platform, it appears that social media may hold the key to the future of live streaming.
Companies like Facebook and Twitter have more than enough financial backing to host live sports on their sites, but it is only a matter of whether they want to focus on that. With Facebook’s latest deal and Twitter’s consistent interest over the last year, it looks like watching the majority of games over social media may not be in the too distant future.