Twitter will also be live streaming the vice presidential debate, and all of the debates will be in the same format as the Thursday Night Football game from last week.
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Twitter said Wednesday that it will carry Bloomberg’s live broadcast of the debates starting Monday, September 26th, and will also include additional political programming both before and after the debates, led by Bloomberg hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.
All the same, if politics make you want to stick your head in the ground these days, heads up – Twitter is also live-streaming National Football League games for entertainment that (for some) seems lower stakes. The company’s strength – delivering data, news and analytics through innovative technology, quickly and accurately – is at the core of the Bloomberg Professional service, which provides real time financial information to more than 325,000 subscribers globally. The news comes just a day after ABC News announced it would stream its coverage on Facebook.
“Twitter is where the 2016 presidential election is happening every single day”, said Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial officer, in a prepared statement. Bloomberg, for example, will stream the same feed on Bloomberg.com and its mobile app, also for free (no pay TV authentication required).
According to a source with knowledge of the partnership, the deal also includes an advertising revenue-sharing arrangement. “By leveraging the power of Twitter’s enormous real-time platform for reaction and analysis, this partnership will provide viewers the opportunity to watch and interact with the news coming from this fall’s debates as they happen live on smartphones, computers and TVs”. Making it easy for users to watch the debate from Twitter, and not even need to use their TV or cable box.
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The company notes tweets sent during the Republican and Democratic debates registered over 1B impressions and that 10M tweets were posted during the first presidential debate of the 2012 cycle. If it all goes well, it could be a big boon for Twitter, which has long struggled getting everyday people to sign up, and it can help secure more streaming deals in the future. And the social media company says there are more deals to come. Twitter makes its streams available to logged out users too, which is a nice touch of onboarding for cord-cutters.
