Twitter partners with Bloomberg Media to create a 24/7 ad-supported Twitter-exclusive live video news channel, expected to start in fall
New Service Comes as Social-Media Firm Fights for Video Ad Dollars — Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.78% has found its first partner for its push into round-the-clock streaming television: Bloomberg.
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement extends an existing relationship rather than starting one: Twitter and Bloomberg had already been sharing revenue on three livestreamed daily shows since mid-2016, and the 24/7 commitment makes Bloomberg the first anchor partner in Twitter's round-the-clock streaming push — a move the company frames explicitly as a fight for video ad dollars.
The bet paid out on both ends within months: Bloomberg's channel launched that December as TicToc, combining live video with a curated Twitter stream, reportedly backed by eight figures in first-year ad revenue, while Twitter widened the roster to 16 streaming partners including BuzzFeed, Viacom, and MLBAM days after this story broke.
First-order effects
- Bloomberg Media converts an existing three-show licensing arrangement into a dedicated, Twitter-exclusive 24/7 channel, gaining a global distribution surface without building its own consumer app audience.
- Twitter gets a flagship always-on news property to sell against in its video ad business, addressing the core problem that its timeline content was episodic and not packaged for continuous ad loads.
Second-order effects
- Other Twitter streaming partners — BuzzFeed, The Verge, Viacom, Live Nation — face pressure to deepen their own commitments from single events toward serialized or always-on formats, since the anchor news slot sets the bar for advertiser expectations.
- Ad buyers gain a new premium package: brand-safe live news sold natively inside a social feed, which pulls budgets away from pre-roll video on publisher-owned sites and toward platform-distributed streams.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news brands restructure from destination sites into channel suppliers embedded in platforms — Bloomberg's TicToc model, where reporting, live feeds, and curated tweets merge into one stream, previews the shape of platform-native journalism.
- The economics also preview a dependency risk: when distribution lives entirely on a partner's platform, the platform controls pricing, placement, and ultimately whether the channel survives — a structure later tested hard by Twitter's own upheavals.
The trend: Social platforms are recruiting established news brands into exclusive, ad-supported live channels, converting publishers from site owners into network suppliers on someone else's infrastructure.