The Little Bird That Flew Into Football

Yesterday during the NFL’s second Thursday Night Football game of the season Twitter live-streamed the game. It wasn’t the social media company’s first foray into live-streaming, but it was their first chance to go after the NFL’s robust fanbase. In a close contest between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills, Twitter was able to target what they hope to be a new market. The game brought in over 45M views, 2M of which were streamed through Twitter. They allowed users multiple ways of accessing the game through their platform. You could stream it on your phone under the moments section, you could access it through a browser, or you could watch it on Apple TV.

There were however a few missed opportunities in the design of the stream. While watching the game they allowed you to see tweets about the game. But they curated the tweets for inappropriate content using an algorithm along with actual people as an added layer of security. And while that might not sound bad by just doing that they missed a huge opportunity to tailor the stream to their users. Essentially, Twitter just showed a series of tweets based on certain hashtags that were related to the game.

I think that they could have capitalized on this opportunity better by personalizing the stream of tweets for each individual user. I think there are a few designs that they could have added to improve the experience. The first being an algorithm that would allow to see what people in your personal network are tweeting about the game. Rather than some random stranger that you have nothing in common with. Another feature for the livestream that I think would be entertaining would be tweets from other NFL athletes and analysts chiming in on the action. I think this would help expand the stream and bring Twitter a larger, more diverse audience.