Twitter may have lost the rights to Thursday Night Football to Amazon, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaving the live TV game. In fact, they may just be diving in a little deeper.
According to recent reports, Twitter is in talks with cable channels to bring live TV to the social media site. The only catch is, it won’t be for everyone. While Twitter’s Thursday Night Football broadcasts were open to people that didn’t even have a Twitter account, their live cable channels will only be available to people who already pay for those channels through a cable package.
Experts predict that a Twitter live television broadcast would look pretty similar to their football offering last season. There would be a content window on top where the live action is shown, and a window off to the side that shows Tweets containing a certain hashtag or phrase.
It’s not clear who exactly Twitter is talking to or how close they are to getting a deal, but it’s most likely traditional cable channels. Local broadcasts would come with a whole new set of rights that are often tough for even the big players in the market like Sling TV and PlayStation Vue to get.
Twitter’s recent struggles have been no secret, and their recent push in to live video likely has a lot to do with their declining growth.
A Twitter representative confirmed these plans, saying “Since last year, we have collaborated on over 40 live stream partnerships and we will continue to bring the best live content to our customers around the world. In Q1 2017, we aired more than 800 hours of live stream content from over 400 events across sports, news, politics and entertainment. The NFL was a great partner to launch our strategy and we will continue to work with them to bring great content to our passionate sports fans.”
