If average users
won’t come to Twitter, then Twitter will come to them.
That seems to be the reasoning behind the social giant’s decision to launch a new Twitter app for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV,
and Microsoft's Xbox One.
The free app features all of the live-streaming video that Twitter has recently been adding to its network. Additional offerings will include popular and trending
Tweets, Vines, and Periscopes.
Consumers don’t need a Twitter account to view any of the app's offerings -- a move that is obviously designed to encourage greater engagement.
For
Twitter, the new app is part of a bigger video strategy to reinvigorate its relationship with users and brand marketers.
Just this week, Twitter partnered with news startup
Cheddar to live stream content. This summer, Twitter launched a live-video stream
of ESPN’s Wimbledon coverage and reached a deal to live-stream several Bloomberg TV shows, including "Bloomberg West," "What’d You Miss?" and "With All Due Respect."
Earlier in the
year, Twitter won
the digital rights to NFL games on Thursday Night. Per the deal, Twitter gets to stream 10 Thursday Night football games while they are simultaneously shown on NBC, CBS and the NFL.
The
National Basketball League also recently announced plans to double the number of game highlights it posts to Twitter, Periscope, and Vine. Of note, the highlights include ads -- the revenue from which
the NBA and Twitter will share.
Otherwise, advertising has been scarce on Twitter’s Live video page -- but analysts say that is sure to change. “We expect direct monetization to
follow,” Nitesh Patel, a director at Strategy Analytics, noted in a recent report.
Worldwide revenue from mobile video will reach $25 billion by 2021, according to the Strategy Analytics
report. The money is mostly coming from advertisers trying to reach a growing mobile-video audience.
Despite the promise of live video, Twitter continues to struggle.
Recently, data emerged
showing that ad agencies are increasingly bypassing the platform in favor other social networks -- Instagram especially. That might explain why the company recently slashed its second-quarter revenue
guidance to $590 million from $610 million -- nowhere near analyst expectations of $678 million.
Worse yet, eMarketer recently released a forecast suggesting that Snapchat will overtake
Twitter in terms of domestic users, before the end of the year.