Twitter is slowly becoming the de facto location for sports live streaming. In April, Twitter won the rights to digitally broadcast ten Thursday Night Football games. But in preparation for live streaming those high-volume matchups, Twitter is broadcasting a major tennis tournament across the pond—Wimbledon.
The live stream began yesterday, and it was Twitter’s first sports live stream broadcast. The site did not provide much press around this but the setup will give NFL fans an inside look at what they may be watching in the fall.
Anyone with an Internet connection can access the feed by visiting this page. The page itself is reminiscent of the similar Twitter moments, but based around one area of video. On the sidebar are selected tweets about Wimbledon, and a prompt to tweet about the tournament with the Wimbledon hashtag automatically added.
This style of live streaming an event is not dissimilar to what we have seen before from sites like Twitch or YouTube.
Get The Latest NFL Tech News In Your Inbox!
At the beginning of the live stream, it was unclear which media group was providing Twitter with the feed, but ESPN, who have had the rights to cover Wimbledon since 2011, later announced that they partnered with Twitter on this project. What’s more, the feed was not perfectly live, and had some major difficulties with keeping on the same exact schedule as the matches in London.
Due to the fact that this coverage of Wimbledon was not heavily publicized, in addition to the seemingly haphazard way in which the live stream was showcased, it seems that this is a test run for Twitter. Even though this is their first ever sports live stream, it looks like they are not reveling in firsts, but more interested in working out the kinks in their platform before Thursday Night Football starts.