Twitter is racing — racing! — to bring more video advertising to the site. The San Francisco-based company is reportedly in talks with NBC and Viacom to add even more TV content to your favorite social media platform.
Bloomberg reports:
Twitter ... is racing to add video content that will get users to spend more time on the site and watch promotions. Building on its existing partnerships with Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s ESPN, Weather Channel LLC and Turner Broadcasting System Inc. (TWX), Twitter is seeking to add more entertainment and news video, two people familiar with the plan said. NBC, which also owns the USA Network, and Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, would make attractive partners given the popularity of their content.
This partnership, it seems, would then allow Twitter to stream videos and then split the ad revenue with the network. Here's an example of what it would look like, via the following highlight clip, embedded in a Tweet from the NCAA March Madness tournament. Behold:
Real-time highlight: @umichbball continues its hot shooting from 3-point land. #NCAAChamp - snpy.tv/Y9h9nU
— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) April 9, 2013
An ad within an ad, basically.
But why work with Twitter on posting ad content rather than a TV network doing it themselves? According to All Things D, it would be best for networks to work with Twitter, saying:
Their argument, according to people who have heard the pitch, is that Twitter can figure out how to display the networks’ content in front of Twitter users who might not know about their channels/shows, but might be inclined to like them if they did.
Twitter (unlike successful yet long-in-the-tooth Facebook) goes together with television the way peanut butter goes together with chocolate. It just works. Bloomberg goes on to report:
Last June, a third of active Twitter users posted on the site about something they watched on TV, up from 26 percent at the beginning of the year, Nielsen Holdings NV (NLSN) said in a report on social media last year. Twitter and Nielsen have agreed to form a partnership to measure the amount of online discussion being generated by TV programs.
FWIW, Twitter, for many of us, have helped bring a much-needed return to live TV viewing. Watching a show in realtime while perusing Twitter — particularly while watching reality programming like #BGC12 or #RHOA — have added an exciting live element to TV sorely lacking in these modern DVR times.
