Twitter is using Wimbledon to serve a first glimpse at what live streaming sports on the platform will look like.
Today, it began broadcasting the ninth day of action from the courts outside of London for free. On desktop, the format is laid out with a high-quality live stream of the Wimbledon’s website feed, despite it displaying “Brought to you by ESPN” on the bottom. Tweets using the #Wimbledon hashtag are displayed on the left.
Live @ Wimbledon – Day 9. Watch LIVE now: https://t.co/JI7WEdvcQQ … #Wimbledon
— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 6, 2016
The layout looks similar, but more compact, on mobile. A few people have reported problems accessing it on their phones, although it worked within the app without an issue for us. Another complaint from users is the selection of matches: ESPN has the U.S. digital streaming rights so Twitter can’t show live matches, rather it’s showing older matches and commentary.
Since the feed from Twitter is ad-free, it’s unclear if Twitter is selling ads with the coverage. This is likely more of an attempt to show off its live streaming capabilities ahead of its NFL streaming package this fall.
“Twitter is increasingly a place where people can find live streaming video, and that includes exciting sporting events like Wimbledon,” Twitter said in a statement. “This livestream is an extremely early and incomplete test experience, and we’ll be making lots of improvements before we launch it in its final form.”
The stream will run throughout the tournament.
Photos via Facebook/Wimbledon.
More in Media
Media Briefing: ‘Cloudflare is locking the door’: Publishers celebrate victory against AI bot crawlers
After years of miserably watching their content get ransacked for free by millions of unidentified AI bot crawlers, publishers were finally thrown a viable lifeline.
How Vogue could navigate potential industry headwinds as Anna Wintour — who agency execs say made ad dollars flow — brings on new edit lead
Anna Wintour’s successor at Vogue will have to overcome the myriad of challenges facing fashion media and the digital publishing ecosystem.
Here are the biggest misconceptions about AI content scraping
An increase in bots scraping content from publishers’ sites represents a huge threat to their businesses. But scraping for AI training and scraping for real-time outputs present different challenges and opportunities.