Twitter To Stream MLB, NHL Games

The social media company Twitter on Monday said the package will include live streams of one out-of-market MLB and NHL game once a week. Twitter and MLB Advanced Media, which owns the digital and TV rights to baseball and most hockey games, wouldn’t say how the games will be selected.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter has now signed deals with four major sports leagues as well as the Pac-12 network for college sports to stream games and shows. In April, Twitter won the rights to stream 10 of the National Football League’s Thursday night games. More recently, the National Basketball Association said last week it will live-broadcast original programming that will be created exclusively for Twitter, though not games.

On the surface, the raft of live-streaming sports partnerships makes sense for Twitter, whose real-time public-messaging service is a natural place for discourse as live events unfold on TV.

Now, Twitter hopes to become more like the neighborhood bar—the place where people don’t just congregate to talk about sports but to watch it. Whether these sports partnerships will lure enough sports fans to help boost Twitter’s user growth is unclear. While some of the shows will be exclusive to Twitter, the games can still be viewed on apps such as MLB.com and larger-screen TVs.

Twitter didn’t say when the MLB and NHL games live-streams will begin and didn’t disclose a schedule of the games to be broadcast.