Comcast’s entertainment division NBC Universal isn’t ready to quit Twitter just yet.
This week, executives at NBC Universal announced it was expanding a long-standing partnership with the social media platform to include special coverage of the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, which will be held in Paris next year.
Starting next February, Twitter will offer special coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games produced by NBC Universal, which holds the domestic broadcast rights to the event. The coverage will include highlights of Olympic qualifying events, special features on athletes and behind-the-scenes coverage of the opening ceremony.
During the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, the NBC Olympics account on Twitter will offer a daily show streamed live with special coverage of the games, including select highlights from the games and medal ceremonies.
“For the first time since 2018, the Olympic and Paralympic Games will return to their true glory in 2024, with full stadiums and the world’s greatest athletes competing against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Paris, where the modern Olympic Games were conceived 130 years ago,” Joe Varvara, the global head of partnerships at Twitter, said during an event for prospective advertisers this week. “Together with NBC Universal, we’re excited to bring you new opportunities to align with the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer.”
The partnership comes at a time when other media brands have pulled back on ad spending and content posting through Twitter, following the platform’s private sale to tech mogul Elon Musk in late October.
Media brands NPR, the BBC, PBS, CBC News and ABC News Australia have stopped posting to Twitter after the website affixed several errant labels on their public profiles that wrongly claimed they were “state-affiliated” and “government-funded.”
This week, technology website Techdirt said it was no longer posting to its main Twitter profile after its content management system, WordPress, stopped supporting a key automation feature. The feature relied on Twitter’s application programming interface, or API, which the platform recently began charging developers up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to access.
