Twitter launches its app on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Xbox One to give millions of users access to their account content on their televisions, including live streams available on Twitter.
This is the latest effort from Twitter to lure more users and widen its mainstream demand with "live" programming such as content from the Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association. The social media firm is also angling for more revenue. These live-streamed events help sell video ads, which usually command a premium as marketers slowly begin to change some television ad dollars to the Internet.
The live streams of 10 NFL games on Thursday nights was acquired by Twitter for about $10 million, including the selling of a portion of the ad inventory. The games will be aired this week. Last season, each of the NFL games had an average of 13 million viewers.
Twitter on the Apple TV, users will be able to view live streaming and top tweets side-by-side on their televisions, as well as top Vines and Periscopes.
Interesting things about the move of Twitter on putting an app on the said devices are:
- It opens up a whole world of live streaming content to the devices and the owners. That is going to be a benefit for cord cutters that are always on the hunt for new and fresh contents and Twitter as it continuously doing partnerships with organizations for live streams, it will open doors to new contents for people who are not interested in applying for a cable subscription in their TVs.
- Users don't need a Twitter account nor cable or satellite subscriptions to access HD streams. It is really worth paying attention to the logged-out users which are harder to track and target due to a lack of interest graph but good thing is, they can still enjoy a lot of Twitter contents.
Twitter has the chance to get its content in front of a ton of new audiences with an app like this. Instead of simply handling the app just for something that serves as a bit of a second screen. This shows the company is very willing to reconnoiter for new form factors and probable platforms to get the best out of Twitter in front of as many people as much as possible.
Speculation is growing that Twitter could become a takeover target. In July, Twitter chalked up another in a series of disappointing quarters, more evidence measures put in place by CEO Jack Dorsey over the past year have done little, if anything, to revive the struggling company's fortunes. Dorsey is expected to be given a few more quarters to turn the company around, unnamed sources told CNBC last week.
