Twitter made a big splash in the sports rights marketplace by landing the NFL Thursday Night Football package in 2016. The social media giant followed up with live broadcasts of MLB, NHL, MLS, WNBA, and NASCAR, among others.
But, unlike Facebook with MLB or Amazon with English Premier League in the U.K., Twitter hasn’t sought exclusive broadcasts and has slowed its acquisition of competition rights. This has been by design, Twitter VP and global head of content partnerships Kay Madati told the Australian Financial Review late last week.
Madati called Twitter a “friend, not foe,” of media companies, and said that its aim was “not to compete with rights holders.” Twitter wants to curate conversations and offer second-screen content that drives the focus back to the primary rights holder.
“We’re here to make those events bigger by marrying the conversation that happens on our platform around those things,” Madati told the AFR. “We’re here to actually come to them and say ‘We can make your event, your investment in this property that much bigger and that much better.’”
Madati’s comments are the most explicit yet about Twitter’s intentions in relation to sports rights. A retrospective reading of recent events shows this course has been true for a couple of years.
Back in May 2017, discussions of Twitter’s media intentions included headlines like this one from Recode: “Twitter still thinks it’s a TV platform.” But the idea of Twitter being a primary destination has been de-emphasized since then. Twitter continues to stream some MLS, WNBA, and NWHL games, but MLB and NHL arrangements have lapsed while the tech company has become more active in a complementary role.
Recent partnerships illustrate that. Twitter carries highlights of every MLB home run, every MLS goal, every goal from recent and ongoing men’s and women’s World Cups, and highlights from the Overwatch League.
New live content is hyper-focused. TNT created fan-voted player isolation cams for some NBA broadcasts. This . baseball season, users can select one MLB hitter whose every at bat that night will be shown live. Last summer, fans could take pictures with a remote camera placed near a corner flag for an MLS rivalry game. Fox Sports produced nightly recap shows during the Russia 2018 World Cup exclusively for Twitter. Several other platforms such as Bleacher Report, ESPN, The Players’ Tribune, and Blizzard Entertainment are all creating live studio shows for commentary and perspective.
“We come up and we show up and we allow our partner to be able to marry us, treat us as a shadow platform that they don’t own but be able to go to an advertiser and say I’m going to offer you the whole thing the whole multi-platform experiences,” Madati told the Australian publication. “And when you talk to advertisers that’s what they want.”