Twitter‘s live video channel launched on Roku devices and the Roku Streaming Player, the Los Gatos, California-based streaming service announced on Thursday. The TV-enabled app is now officially available across the majority of the Roku ecosystem and can be accessed by Roku’s customers free of charge, the company confirmed. The service itself is identical to the one that launched on the Xbox One, Fire TV, and a number of other devices in late 2016, as it allows users to watch live video content ennobled with real-time tweets. In addition to being available at no cost to Roku’s existing customers, Twitter’s TV app also doesn’t require users to have a Twitter account to access it, though their viewing experience will likely be more personalized if they do.
The company’s streaming service is still primarily focused on sports, though its portfolio is expected to grow and diversify in the future. Twitter and Roku developed the new app together, the latter revealed, implying that the service might be updated with more features in the future. In light of that fact, while the vanilla version of Twitter’s live video channel for Roku devices doesn’t ship with Periscope support, that functionality may be added to the platform in the future. The newly announced service is expected to benefit both Roku and Twitter, as the former will provide its customers with yet another free service that will likely boost its user retention and acquisition rates, while the latter will be able to push its service to approximately 14 million users that Roku has today. While at least some of Roku’s existing customers are already using Twitter’s video streaming service, this deal still allows the San Francisco-based social media giant to reach millions of new users.
The announcement of Roku’s support for Twitter’s live video channel follows shortly after Twitter said it will increase its focus on video content in an effort to differentiate its platform and create new revenue growth avenues. While the company has been steadily adding users to its service in recent years, it’s still struggling to operate in a profitable manner and producing video content is its latest attempt at becoming a sustainable business. An update on Twitter’s operations is expected to follow later this year.