Twitter COO Anthony Noto Discusses Live Video Tab, Global Livestreaming

Twitter livestreamed more than 800 hours of “premium” content during the first quarter of 2017, covering more than 450 events and reaching 45 million unique users globally, chief operating officer Anthony Noto said during the social network’s annual shareholders’ meeting conference call Monday. During the question-and-answer portion of the call, Noto addressed the addition of a live tab, as well as plans for livestreaming sports events and news in the European Union. On the live tab, Noto said: (CEO Jack Dorsey) showed the newest discovery mechanism for our live product, and that's within the Explore tab of the Android operating system. And we have plans to roll that out also on iOS over time. So within the Explore tab today on iOS, you have a trends module, a Moments module and, in the future, you'll have a live module that lists out all of those events that are currently live. If you have an Android device today, you can see that, as Jack demonstrated today, in that third module for live. We had the e-sports weekly new show, which shows the highlights in the last week in e-sports. And we also had a replay of the Billboard Music Awards red carpet last night. We will continue to really innovate around discovery for live. Over the past year, we really wanted to use the product's natural mechanisms, its organic functionality to drive discovery of these products. We could build that natural muscle up. It's very important that the product reflects what you care about the most as opposed to what we're deciding to put in front of you if it's not based on data and machine learning that says it's the most relevant for you. And so live in the Explore tab is the first destination that we have for the live product, and it's something we're excited about and Jack demonstrated today. If you didn't have a chance to see that, it's on the Android device. And in response to a user question about live sporting events and news in the EU, Noto replied: Our live strategy is global. We want to leverage those four categories that we talked about during my prepared remarks—sports, e-sports, live news and politics and live entertainment—across the globe. We've already actually shown some stuff in Germany. You may have missed it: #streetgigs, which was a partnership that we had with Deutsche Telekom, and we showed Depeche Mode, a live concert, which was a really great success. Below the live concert that we had available on Twitter, we curated the best tweets and the best conversations that were happening globally across Twitter into that curated timeline using our machine learning. And it really gave you the sense that you are experiencing that concert with other people as if you were in the concert hall. And just two weeks ago, we did that again with Zac Brown, and that was in the U.S. But we'll look to do those things globally. So our strategy is global, and we've continued to expand throughout international markets, including transfer day in the U.K., in addition to the baseball national championship in Japan, the Melbourne Cup in Australia. And so there's many more efforts that we have on a global basis to continue to have content emanating from those countries. Our goal is to really make all of the content available globally, just like the tweets are. Image courtesy of AndreyPopov/iStock.