Twitter COO outlines plans for making the company profitable, 24/7 TV-style programming will be key

Twitter intends to take on TV with its plans for streaming live video programming 24/7.

The social media company has been struggling to better engage its users and has seen virtually no growth for years. Earnings are also down. To add to this, Twitter’s inability to reign in trolls and the like has also hurt the platform a great deal.

One solution that Twitter appears to have hit upon is to stream live video programming. The company’s initial attempts to do so were very successful, after all. As Buzzfeed points out, Twitter’s NFL coverage brought in 3.5 million unique views, its Oscar coverage another 6.4 million, Inauguration Day got them 8.6 million and Election Day coverage got it 7.7 million unique views.

These numbers add up and prove the potential of a continuously streaming platform.

Buzzfeed reports that the company now intends to use the above viewership numbers to get advertisers on board and to get the money flowing. It’s most likely that Twitter will tempt them with offers of 15-30 second unskippable ads.

The idea is to have news, entertainment and sports programming running on the site 24/7. As Buzzfeed suggests, you can think of these streaming options as Twitter TV.

The planned programming is understandably US-centric for now, but if it picks up, we’re sure to see some India-specific content in the future.

What do you think? Would you really watch Twitter TV?