The microblogging platform Twitter has just launched its first ever sports livestream on July 6th, 2016 by showing Wimbledon games.
Wimbledon is one of the most-watched tennis event of the year, and there is no argue that Twitter that is on its way to increase user engagement wants to have more eyes using its platform. The company began streaming Wimbledon, with coverage beginning on day 9, with the men's quarterfinals.
At first sight, the feature and appearance look similar to any other livestreaming services that have commentary side such as YouTube and Twitch. The Twitter product is still basic. On laptops and PCs for example, viewers can see the video coverage on the left of their screens and a Twitter timeline on the right. On mobile, the video appears on top of the screen, while the feed is displayed at the bottom.
Here, tweets about the event is associated with hashtags (in Winbledon, it is #wimbledon), and they appear along the side. Users can tweet directly along the stream without having to open another window. So here, Twitter is leveraging user experience.
At the Wimbledon stream, users cannot yet filter the feed to show only tweets from people they follow who are tweeting about the event.
Besides the livestreaming, associated accounts with Wimbledon such as @Wimbledon and @ESPN are also livestreaming it. Users can pause or mute the stream, but can't rewind it if they miss anything.
Twitter is increasingly a place where people can find live streaming video, and that includes sporting events like Wimbledon. As its first livestream, it's still extremely early and incomplete test experience. Twitter aims to make more improvements before launching the feature in its final form.
So Wimbledon's livestream is a soft launch of Twitter's sports livestreaming tool
For example, Twitter wants to have access to live interviews as well as analysis and match replays. But at the moment, ESPN still holds the U.S. digital streaming rights for all Wimbledon's live matches after it bought exclusive TV rights for the event back in 2011.
Previously, Twitter has been working together with both Wimbledon and ESPN to make this feature happen.
