Twitter is talking to the NBA, MLS and Turner to buy rights to more sports streams
Twitter is looking to ink more NFL-style streaming deals. — Twitter wants to stream more TV-like live video around major sporting events, so it's approaching the folks who control those rights to cut a deal.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second phase of a deliberate push: after winning the NFL's Thursday night package from Amazon and Verizon in April (beating both bidders for the NFL stream) and testing a dedicated Live page around Wimbledon with video beside scrollable tweets (the Wimbledon Live-page experiment), Twitter is now going back to the rights holders — the NBA, MLS and Turner — to buy more of the same inventory.
The arc matters because each step compounds: the NFL deal proved Twitter could outbid incumbents, the Wimbledon test showed what a broadcast-style product looks like on the platform, and these talks would turn a one-off into a slate. A month later Twitter was already negotiating to put its app on Apple TV to give those streams a living-room destination.
First-order effects
- The NBA, MLS and Turner gain a new non-traditional bidder for streaming rights, adding pricing pressure on top of the competition Twitter already introduced when it took the NFL package from Verizon and Amazon.
- Twitter's live-video team converts its NFL win and Wimbledon test into a pitch for a multi-league slate, moving the company from experimental streams toward scheduled, TV-like programming.
Second-order effects
- Amazon and Verizon, having lost the NFL bid to Twitter, face a rival building exclusive live inventory that makes every subsequent rights auction more expensive for them.
- Turner's participation is notable because it is itself a broadcaster — selling Twitter a slice of rights it controls means incumbent media companies start arbitraging their own packages across platforms rather than hoarding them.
Third-order effects
- If leagues keep splitting digital rights from traditional TV packages, sports rights markets restructure around platform bidders, and the pattern did hold: by 2018 Twitter had announced thirty new or renewed video deals spanning ESPN, NBCUniversal, MLB and others (the 2018 slate of thirty content deals).
- Distribution follows content: pairing the rights buys with an Apple TV app push points toward social platforms competing with pay-TV not just for clips but for the full lean-back viewing session.
The trend: Live sports rights are being unbundled from television packages and re-auctioned to social platforms, with Twitter's 2016 buying spree as the template that turned one NFL deal into a standing content business.