Amazon owned video game streaming platform Twitch has made yet another play in the sports sector, inking a multi-year deal with the International Basketball Federation, aka FIBA, that will see their content broadcast on twitch streams and for the platform’s viewers.
According to Yahoo Sports, FIBA will broadcast around 600 hours of live basketball games each year but will also give fans and influencers access to official footage to create their own content as part of the new deal, big content creator news in the streaming world.
“It is not a platform like YouTube where you just stream your games and people consume. You have to use the specificity of Twitch which means you have to invest in interactivity and co-streamers who are very important influencers on the platform,” Frank Leenders, Director General of FIBA Media and Marketing Services said, according to Reuters.
“It is a partnership where we use the resources predominantly to adapt our content, build up the community and be successful over the next two years,” Leenders added. “We believe that it is something we should embrace… to be successful with a demographic that the sports world is struggling to capture.”
“Whilst Twitch is known for its heritage in gaming, we have seen this organic growth outside of gaming in the last few years, particularly in music and sport,” Charlie Beall, Twitch EMEA Sports Lead said.
“Non-gaming content has quadrupled over the last three years. Twitch is a community which meets around passion points and clearly that has tie-ins with particular sports.
“We identified basketball as a global sport with passionate communities in territories around the world and we want to try to do something different around the live interactive element that marks Twitch’s service out,” he added.
