Twitter targets 24/7 video content as revenues fall

Social media company Twitter has said it plans to take a 24/7 approach to live video content as it recorded its first quarterly revenue decrease.

Twitter has been ramping up its presence in the live video market and struck its latest sports deal this week by partnering with the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf) to stream live coverage of yesterday’s (Wednesday’s) final of its 2016-17 Champions League club competition.

Twitter's chief operating officer and chief financial officer, Anthony Noto, told the BuzzFeed News website that the company plans to air live video 24 hours a day, 7 days a week inside its apps and desktop site, building on the 800-plus hours it aired in the first three months of 2017.

“We will definitely have 24/7 (video) content on Twitter,” Noto said. “Our goal is to be a dependable place so that when you want to see what’s happening, you think of going to Twitter.”

Noto said Twitter has a “lot in the pipeline” in terms of video programming and shrugged off the recent loss of its NFL American football league package. The NFL this month assigned rights to its Thursday Night Football package for the 2017 season to e-commerce and media company Amazon, with Twitter having previously held the contract.

“It was instrumental (in generating additional interest),” Noto said of the NFL deal. “It’s a really high-profile brand and one that has really high expectations for product quality. It caused people to come and see if we could deliver.”

Noto suggested that further sports content opportunities could lie with mixed martial arts promotion the Ultimate Fighting Championship. “We have a really big audience when there’s a pay-per-view UFC match,” Noto said. “Should we provide that content to the audience on Twitter that’s not watching it, but might like to after seeing tweets about it? That’s something we’d consider.”

Noto’s comments came as Twitter released its quarterly financial results yesterday. Twitter registered an eight-per-cent fall in first-quarter revenue to $548m (€514.1m), representing the first such drop since it listed on the stock market in 2013.

Twitter, which has never turned a profit, reported a net quarterly loss of $62m compared to $80m in the first quarter of 2016. However, while not specifying exact figures on its daily userbase, Twitter said monthly active users had increased by six per cent over the past year to 328 million.