Twitter is striving to increase its presence as an online streaming platform and the social media giant is now partnering with Bloomberg for a 24/7 news broadcasting channel, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the details provided by industry insiders, the new service will be announced later today by Michael Bloomberg and Jack Dorsey, while it’s expected to be launched at some point this fall. No financial aspects of the deal are currently available and there’s still no word on how the upcoming service will be called.
The new channel is said to go beyond Bloomberg’s existing TV news coverage which places a large focus on finance and produces a mix of broadcasts from its various global news outlets. All content will be curated and verified, and according to Bloomberg’s Media CEO Justin Smith, the upcoming service will target an intelligent audience around the globe. Commenting on the new deal, Twitter’s COO and CFO, Anthony Noto revealed hopes that the partnership with Bloomberg will transform Twitter into a viable alternative for cord cutters. This isn’t the first time Twitter and Bloomberg have partnered, as the two previously worked together to cover the 2016 US Presidential debates. While not many details are known about the news broadcasting channel at this point, it’s understood that the service will be monetized through ads. Video gives Twitter a good opportunity to push more ads, which is probably why the company has been targeting this niche quite heavily as of late.
The latest turn of events comes shortly after Twitter announced its ambitions related to broadcasting video content covering news, sports, and entertainment 24/7. Twitter is no stranger to video streaming, either; last year, Twitter won the rights to NFL’s Thursday games, though it ended up losing them to Amazon this season. Despite having to deal with worried investors, Twitter didn’t seem too distressed about the NFL affair and immediately produced new statistics to emphasize how much video they’ve streamed beyond football in recent months. According to the company’s own logs, in Q1 2017, Twitter aired more than 800 hours of live content from 400 events covering sports, news, politics, and entertainment. News of this partnership arrived not long after the company’s quarterly earnings report revealed a decline in revenue for the first time since the firm went public in 2013. However, the same report showed that Twitter added nine million monthly active users over the first quarter of this year.