Live streaming of football games and presidential debates, version 1.0

I would also be willing to pay for interaction -- perhaps asking a question or making a comment of my own.

There has been a lot of discussion of the appropriate role of moderators in the presidential debates -- should they challenge the debater's statements if they are false or simply ask questions and let the candidates challenge each other? That will become a moot point in the era of live-streaming on the Internet.

Twitter is streaming Thursday night football games -- you see the game as well as the stream of tweets. I reviewed the experience and concluded that there were too many commercials and that I wanted to be able to filter the tweets. I am not interested in the comments of a million football fans, but would like to be able to follow the live-stream comments of experts like a group of professional football players, sports writers, Las Vegas odds-makers, etc.

Now, let's apply that to the live streaming of a presidential debate. (Note that Twitter is streaming the debates).

There will be plenty of commentary in the tweet stream accompanying Twitter's video and the audience will fact-check the debaters regardless of what the moderator does. But, as in a football game, I don't want to see tweets from every partisan viewer, I want to see informed, factual commentary.

If I could watch the streaming comments of a relatively small group of experts along with the video stream, I would not care whether the moderator challenges the debater's statements or just reads questions and keeps the speakers on schedule. I would also be willing to pay for interaction -- perhaps asking a question or making a comment of my own.

The asynchronous Internet has changed political campaigns just as newspapers, radio and television did. Now we have a new medium -- live streaming over the Internet.

Early movies, like those shown below, were made by filming stage plays. Similarly, today's live coverage of football and presidential debates is just a starting point. Adding expert or crowd-sourced fact checking and commentary would only be a small variation on what Twitter has already done with football games. There will be more changes as the medium co-evolves along with our culture and education system.

Football streaming on Twitter -- too many commercials and need to be able to filter tweets -- but like all new media, it will improve.

I watched a bit of Thursday Night Football on Twitter last night. You could watch a small screen with tweets as shown above or go full screen and lose the tweets. I watched it on a laptop with a large, high resolution screen and on a Mac with a 21-inch display and the video was smooth and looked good on both. That was the good news.

The bad news was the commercials. I am not a football fan, so do not know how many commercials a typical broadcast game has, but it seemed like Twitter spent more time on commercials than the game. I would be curious to see statistics on the number of minutes spent on commercials, commentary and game action on Twitter versus broadcast television.

I “cut the cord” years ago, so am used to paying Netflix and others for streamed content without commercials. If I am typical, Twitter will fail with this commercial-based business model. (The Motley Fool Web site says the ads did not pay off in the first game, which was streamed last week).

For a while, I watched both the TV broadcast and the Twitter stream. The Twitter stream was relatively delayed, but the lag time varied and they did not have the same commercials. I wonder how the commercial sales and revenue are handled.

Turning to the user interface – I did not time it, but it seemed like there about 20 tweets every thirty seconds. With that many tweets coming in, I think the best way to watch would be to go full screen during the live play and mute the audio and read tweets during the commercials -- not a good deal for advertisers.

I did not notice any obviously malicious tweets, so I assume there is some automatic or human filtering, but it would be better if they would let the user control the filtering. For example, to let one see only tweets from a selected group of friends or a selected group of experts like professional football players, sports analysts or professional gamblers.

But, lest I seem too negative -- this is their first try at streaming sports. All new media stumble at first, often copying what came before. The first movies were made by filming stage plays and there are many other examples from radio, TV, textbooks, online learning, etc.

Twitter is streaming the US presidential debates next -- let's see how they do on that.