Twitter Inc. (TWTR) is embracing live video in a bigger way, announcing it has inked partnerships with ESL and Dreamhack, two of the largest organizations in the pro-gaming world, to broadcast e-sports events and other content.
According to the companies, starting Saturday Twitter will live-stream ESL’s Intel Extreme Masters World Championship, being held in Katowice, Poland. The sport event will be broadcasted for free on Twitter. Twitter said more than an additional 15 events will be live-streamed from the e-sports world from both ESL and Dreamhack during the year. Twitter is also gearing up to broadcast a 30-minute weekly show that features game highlights and behind-the-scene moments. (See also: Weibo on
Track to Surpass Twitter In Users.)
Fine-Tuning Its Live-Video Strategy
The move on the part of Twitter comes at a time when it appears to be struggling with how it will embrace live video. Unlike rival Facebook Inc. (FB), which successfully rolled out Facebook Live, Twitter hasn’t set in stone its strategy when it comes to live content. It does have deals with NFL to live-steam big games and events and also lived-streamed the presidential debates, but some industry watchers argue it appears to be lost when it comes to live video. Ben Thompson, the author and operator of Stratchery.com, posted a scathing blog post this week in which he argued that Twitter has failed to innovate beyond its initial idea and its approach to live-streaming is to take a page from traditional media companies and television instead of coming up with unique ways to embrace this growing and important medium. “The initial concept was so good, and so perfectly fit such a large market, that they never needed to go through the process of achieving product market fit. The problem, though, was that by skipping over the wrenching process of finding a market, Twitter still has no idea what their market actually is, and how they might expand it. Twitter is the company-equivalent of a lottery winner who never actually learns how to make money, and now they are starting to pay the price,” he wrote.
Thompson went on to point out that Twitter’s strategy with the recent Oscars telecast was to simply live-stream the awards show, similar to how it live-streamed NFL games and the debates. “Twitter’s goal of owning ‘live’ could mean so much more: how might the product evolve if Twitter had the sort of product mindset found at companies like Amazon, Netflix, or Airbnb?” wrote Thomson.
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