Twitter’s deal to show Premier League goals isn’t a game changer – but it could be

Last week, Twitter announced that Sky Sports would be able to broadcast goals and action from 126 live Premier League games being shown on Sky over the 2016/17 Premier League season.

Are traditional broadcasters finally trying to reach out to the digital age? After all, it would seem to be a smart strategy that takes into account the fact that digital media is no longer the future: it’s the present.

Twitter have been on a sports-rights shopping spree of late. They’ve snapped up rights to show NFL games live, but also to show content around basketball, baseball and ice hockey and even streamed Wimbledon at the start of the summer. So football is a logical next step.

And yet, this isn’t a new thing. This is simply a case of two big companies finally realising that they can boost their own profiles by muscling in on the status quo. And that’s one of the main reasons for doing it.

If you take a trip to Twitter during a Premier League football match, football tends to be the only thing you’ll hear people talking about. And within seconds of a goal being scored, you’re also likely to see videos of the goal being shared by thousands of users. It may not be legal and the videos may be deleted quickly, but if you’re not watching the game live – or even if you are – and you want to see the goal that’s just been scored, Twitter is usually your best bet.

So Sky’s decision to broadcast the goals on Twitter as soon as they’ve gone in has two benefits for the company: one is to stop the pirating of the content that they have the rights to, and the second is quite simply to give the people what they quite clearly want.

Pirating content is an obvious problem for broadcasters with the rights to live Premier League games. Not only is it their content being pirated, but it is also being repackaged by Twitter accounts who generate followers and fans based on the fact that they are providing videos of live matches.

The demand from football fans on social media – a grouping which represents a huge chunk of social media users and football fans alike – is so high that they are happy to consume grainy footage and share it in large numbers, often with an @handle or a website name plastered all over it. For Sky, it’s surely a no-brainer to muscle in on this action and present their followers with high definition video and Sky’s very own branding all over it.

Not only will it stop people from pirating the content for which Sky paid so much money, but it will also boost the followers, exposure and shareability of the @Skyfootball Twitter account. With the quality of the content Sky can produce for Twitter far surpassing any pirated content, Sky’s output will be the place to go if you want Premier League goals.

It’s the same principle that BT Sport have been pushing for the past few seasons, specifically on their European football content. This is the kind of video we can expect from Sky this season.

So in the short term, this isn’t a game changer. Long term, though, it could be the platform on which things change.

The idea that Twitter users will get their Premier League highlights and analysis from Sky’s account doesn’t seem plausible just yet. What Sky are doing with this initiative is making the existing way in which social media users consume football content slightly better.

What will be interesting, however, is where this will lead in the future. Highlights shows like the BBC’s Match of the Day will be threatened – and will only be threatened – if Sky are able to make free content and analysis available on social media, and also make it available to play back afterwards. That’s when highlights and analysis shows will have a problem, because the content provided on social media will include both game footage and insight – which covers both their selling points.

But for now, all Sky are doing is muscling-in on the space that certain Twitter accounts are occupying to give social media users exactly what they would have been consuming anyway. Only better.

Twitter, for their part, get some extra – licensed – content to boost their own profile and continue their drive to get more live sport on the platform.

In this deal, Sky and Twitter are the winners – and yet the status quo hasn’t really changed.

About author

Chris McMullan
Chris McMullan 831 posts

Chris is a sports journalist and editor of Digital Sport - follow him on Twitter @CJMcMullan_

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