Twitter to Stream the Republican and Democratic Conventions

Now you can watch the conventions and retweet sick burns about politics from the same place.
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Twitter has been perhaps the most talked about platform this election cycle. (Thanks, Donald Trump.) Now, in hopes of capturing even more of the political conversation, the company is announcing that it will livestream the Republican National Convention when it kicks off next week in Cleveland, followed by the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the week after that.

The streams will be available on both the mobile and web apps through Twitter's new Live product. The company recently tested Live during Wimbledon, streaming matches through a broadcasting partnership with the tennis tournament organizers.1 Later this year, the company will also team up with the NFL to stream Thursday night football.

The convention coverage, which will be shot by CBS and its online affiliate CBSN, is part of that push into event-based livestreaming, a fitting move for a company whose core strength has always been real-time events.

Throughout this election cycle, Twitter has vied with other social media sites for a share of the public attention. But it has excelled in moments when people want to huddle together to talk about one thing and one thing only. On debate nights, Twitter is the modern day spin room, and when a crisis hits, it's typically the first place candidates go to respond. Facebook may have more users, but Twitter tends to have the densest, most instantaneous conversations around a single topic.

"Twitter is the fastest way to find out what’s happening in politics and to have a discussion about it,” Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. The goal of the livestream, he said, is to give "people around the world the best way to experience democracy in action.”

Just how you'll find the Twitter Live stream of the conventions is unclear, but CBS will likely tweet out a link to the Live page. A link to the page may also appear in the Twitter Moment for the convention. Either way, a spokesman for Twitter says, "It won't be hard to find."

The stream will be available to people who don't have a Twitter account as well, which should help expose the platform to new users and show them why it's useful. As the video streams on the live page, the company will also surface Tweets from across the platform that are relevant to that moment, using a combination of hashtags and its own algorithm.

For Twitter, this partnership is a smart move. Already, audiences are used to watching a live event on television, then turning to Twitter to comment on it. Now Twitter is placing the entire experience on the second screen. It also gives Twitter a way to compete with Facebook's live feature, which delegates and other convention attendees will no doubt be using to cover everything that happens on and off the convention floor.

And for American voters, it will make the sometimes opaque and bizarre process of picking a president just a little more transparent.

1. Correction 09:32 am ET 7/11/16 An earlier version of this story mistakenly reported that Twitter partnered with ESPN. It partnered with Wimbledon.