Twitter Partners With Turner Sports To Create A New Social Media Platform
Twitter and Turner Sports debuted the newest platform in their partnership, the fan-voted iso-cam. The iso-cam coverage began during the second half of this Sunday’s NBA All-Star game that aired on TNT. All of this is thanks to a deal between the NBA, Turner Sports and Twitter. The Twitter iso-cam will also be featured at an additional 20 TNT NBA broadcasts throughout the rest of the season.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the project this January at CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Both executives hope this new type of digital feed which offers a “single player view” will entice more fans to come to games to have a more intimate interaction with their favorite player.
“We were coming together and brainstorming, saying, ‘How do we capture that NBA fan on Twitter when games are actually going on?’ and we came up with the concept of the live stream during the live game,” stated Mark Johnson, SVP of digital at Turner Sports. “That is where fans are consuming when they’re consuming. They’re using Twitter as a complementary, secondary experience to follow scores and highlights and keep up with what’s going on on a nightly basis.”
The NBA has dedicated itself to expanding their digital footprint due in significant part to the success of #NBATwitter. According to Twitter, the NBA was the most tweeted-about sports league in 2018 with more than 100 million NBA-related tweets leading up to the NBA finals this past May. The NBA has figured out a way to leverage social media to keep relevant and in the process create an enthusiastic online following.
“If I knew what the secret sauce was, I’d bottle up it spread it around to every single league property that I work with,” stated TJ Adeshola, Twitter’s head of sports league partnerships. “NBA Twitter just has this really special connectivity to it that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
It’s really reflective of the league’s approach in the broader marketplace to be innovative, to give their players this level of authenticity and connectivity. It’s relatively unprecedented in the sports space, which lends itself to a perfect, perfect marriage with a Twitter platform. The league has been the one to lift up the hood and give folks a unique view.”
So, this new social media partnership initiative should prove to be nothing short of spectacular. In each of the 20 games, fans will have the opportunity to place their ballot vote on Twitter for which of 4 different players they want the iso-cam to follow for the entirety of the second half. The top vote-getter will then have one camera follow their every move, and when the player is not on the court, Twitter will use alternate camera angles, like the backboard camera instead. The feed will then be available live on the @NBAonTNT Twitter account.
Each video feed will also come with an original broadcast team. This Sunday that group consists of B. Dot (Brandon Armstrong), Taylor Rooks and Candice Parker with special guest Rob Perez. And appearing on the first ballot will be All-Star game captains Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James as well as fellow all-stars Steph Curry and James Harden. Tip-off on TNT will be at 8 PM EST.
According to Mark Johnson, SVO of digital at Turner Sports, the Twitter following for the NBA, NBA on TNT and NBA TV is over 34 million. The key is to tap into that 34 million and keep them engaged and coming back for more.
The league itself is player driven, and the players themselves are truly the stars. Not only are their skills on display day-in and day-out on the platform, but the players themselves have Twitter accounts in which they can interact with fans regularly. Fans love having complete access to their favorite players, so giving them the opportunity to vote for the ‘it’ player of the night on a platform everyone uses, Twitter, makes perfect sense.
“We see it as complementary experience,” said Johnson. “We are hopeful that this will drive viewership to the TNT broadcast because we’re reaching this new-ish audience and a younger demographic, and offering a different and custom piece of content on Twitter tied to a different experience than on television. It is going to educate people and make them aware that we’ve got the full game.”
The importance of finding new ways to stream games and stand out in the sports realm is pivotal to the success and growth of Twitter.
“What we know is that users might not be as inclined to watch a show or program on Twitter that looks just like the linear broadcast,” stated Adeshola. “We want a differentiated, unique, quote-unquote ‘Twittery’ experience on Twitter. If we forced a format like the linear one and smacked it right on Twitter with no differentiation, it may not perform as well as one that feels Twitter-specific… This is a complement of the great work of the Turner linear broadcast, to reward and incentivize the #NBATwitter community.”
The results are in and Giannis Antetokounmpo was selected to be the first NBA player featured on the iso-camera. Stay tuned for more updates.
