Twitter yesterday carried its first live streaming of a sports event during Wimbledon, and the fact that users did not "need a cable subscription" or even a Twitter account to watch the stream was "what worked," according to Kurt Wagner of RE/CODE. Twitter "pinned the video feed to the top of the page and let you scroll through tweets without ever moving away from the stream." On the negative side, the screen "was too small," and the stream of tweets "wasn't very good." Also, people "couldn't find the link to the Wimbledon stream." Wagner: "Nailing this experience will be key, and Twitter has a ways to go" (RECODE.net, 7/7). THE STREET's Eric Jhonsa noted Twitter's streaming effort "remains very much a work in progress." Twitter "didn't try hard to promote the stream on its site and apps, and didn't make it clear that live matches weren't being streamed." With dozens of new tweets "appearing in the Wimbledon feed every minute, the company needs to find a way to filter more interesting and/or popular tweets from the others" (THESTREET.com, 7/6). Meanwhile, QUARTZ' Mike Murphy wrote this "could well end up being the most important new thing Twitter has unveiled in a while." Twitter's live-streaming site "doesn't seem wildly different from similar services already available on the web, such as YouTube or Twitch, where the video is accompanied by a steady stream of comments from watchers." But unlike those sites, the comments on Twitter "are tweets, publicly available and easily searchable." In the case of the Wimbledon broadcast, it "seems that Twitter was pulling in any tweet that mentioned @wimbledon or #wimbledon" (QZ.com, 7/6).
