US pay-television sports broadcaster ESPN has announced plans to show highlights of sporting events on social networking website Twitter, according to the Wall Street Journal newspaper.
The report said that, under an expanded partnership between ESPN and Twitter, the broadcaster would show highlights clips of several sporting events in the coming year, including international football matches and the X Games action sports events.
The clips will be available via Twitter’s website and mobile applications ‘shortly after the action happens’ on television, the newspaper added.
ESPN plans to sell advertisements that will run inside the video clips.
As part of an existing partnership between the two companies, ESPN trialled showing highlights of US college American football games in December 2012. According to ESPN, the highlights videos were accessed more than seven million times.
Twitter has also been in talks about online video opportunities with other US broadcasters, including the NBCUniversal media company and the CBS network, and the Fox network said on Monday that it would show video clips on Twitter, the report added.
“There is certainly a lot of interest from broadcasters,” Glenn Brown, Twitter's head of promoted content and sponsorships, said. “Video is very popular on the web; it's what our TV partners are good at doing, and it's an area that ad partners are most interested in.”