Twitter announced a slate of video partnerships with companies including the NFL, ESPN and The Wall Street Journal as part of its presentation at the 9th annual NewFronts on Monday. Overall, the company announced 13 programming agreements that will bring hundreds of hours of content to the social media site, which recently announced an 18% increase in revenue for 2018.
As part of a multiyear partnership extension with Twitter, the NFL will launch multiple live shows anchored around the football league’s tentpole events. Under the agreement, the NFL will increase the number of video posts on the site with new video clip series and content formats including Q&As and fan polls.
The MLS also announced a multi-year extension of its content agreement with Twitter that includes game highlights — such as posting every goal on Twitter — and live coverage of select matches in English via @UnivisionSports and @MLS.
The partnerships are just two of several sports-related content deals Twitter announced. Also in the works is the launch of ESPN Onsite — which will act as a brand extension of existing ESPN franchises including “The College Football Show,” “Hoop Streams,” “Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show” and “MLS Countdown Live” — the return of Bleacher Report’s digital series “House of High Lights” and the launch of “Don’t @ Me,” a new interactive series from The Player’s Tribune which features two athletes battling out “Greatest of All Time” topics.
In addition to sports, the company has partnered with The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Time and CNET to bring more news coverage to its platform. As part of its agreement, The Wall Street Journal is launching WSJ What’s Now, a new franchise that will deliver breaking headlines, business analysis and markets insights to Twitter in an original video format. As part of WSJ What’s Now, The Wall Street Journal will livestream its premium conferences and events, including the Future of Everything and WSJ Tech D.
Live Nation, Viacom and Blizzard Entertainment will use the platform to stream coverage of select events in their respective fields. Live Nation, for example, is launching a concert and festival series exclusively on Twitter, which will feature 10 concerts over a period of 10 weeks. And, for the first time, Blizzard Entertainment will livestream select coverage of its gaming convention, BlizzCon 2019. Coverage will include BlizzCon’s opening ceremony, exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews and live broadcasts, clips and highlights of game-developer panels, and esports tournaments. In the case of Viacom, the company will continue to stream red carpet coverage of BET, CMT and MTV’s tentpole events.
Additionally, Twitter is increasing its offering for Latino users through a partnership with Univision that will include 2020 Election analysis and reporting and select highlights from the soccer leagues Liga MX and UEFA Champions.
“When you collaborate with the top publishers in the world, you can develop incredibly innovative ways to elevate premium content and bring new dimensions to the conversations that are already happening on Twitter,” Twitter global VP and head of content partnerships, Kay Madati, said. “Together with our partners, we developed this new slate of programming specifically for our audiences, and designed the content to fuel even more robust conversation on Twitter.”