You may not have been aware, but Twitter is much more than just a place for you to argue with people you don’t know about issues without clear solutions. Last fall the social media company signed a deal with the NFL to stream Thursday Night Football over their network, and the marriage of easy to access game feeds with the network you talk about those sports on was a pretty big success. Unfortunately for Twitter, Amazon then stepped in and snapped up NFL streaming rights for this season.
But that won’t stop Twitter from expanding on live streams. In a new interview with Buzzfeed News, Twitter COO and CFO Anthony Noto declared that Twitter will eventually be broadcasting live video 24 hours a day. At the top of the list of sports Noto thinks could replace the NFL following their defection? The UFC.
“We have a really big audience when there’s a pay-per-view UFC match,” Noto told Buzzfeed News. “Should we provide that content to the audience on Twitter that’s not watching it, but might like to after seeing tweets about it? That’s something we’d consider.”
The UFC and Twitter have long been part of a mutual admiration society that saw the league adopt Twitter early and push it hard amongst its athletes and fans. That’s led to the organization have a huge number of fans engaged with the sport through the social network, something the company has responded to by creating custom emojis during larger UFC events.
How to unlock the special Twitter emoji
#↔️ Nate↔️Diaz = #NateDiaz
#↔️ Conor↔️ McGregor = #ConorMcGregor
Boom! 👊🏽 pic.twitter.com/JwXTGy0mWM— UFC (@ufc) August 16, 2016
Teaming up with Twitter would be a no-brainer for the promotion, although some would note the quality of UFC cards is already feeling watered down with its current 40+ event a year slate. But one of the biggest problems fans of the UFC face is trying to watch the content. If you don’t have FOX Sports 1 or heaven forbid live in Canada where events are on Ocho-like channels such as TSN5, knowing you can easily watch events on Twitter could be a game changer.
Not clear in this article is whether there’s an imminent deal with the UFC and Twitter in the works or if this will have to wait until the UFC’s current deal with FOX ends in 2018. But it goes to show you that both the UFC and Twitter are thinking outside the box when it comes to getting more live broadcasts out to sports fans.
