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Suicide Squad ushers in red carpet live streaming on Twitter

Warner Bros. has brought Twitter live-streaming video to mainstream film fans by partnering with Buzzfeed for a live broadcast from the red carpet of the highly anticipated Suicide Squad premiere. 

While sports, politics and news have recently dominated the deals made with Twitter for live broadcasting, entertainment has been relatively untouched, leaving these fans out of the loop. The big premiere for Suicide Squad was broadcasted live on Twitter last night, which may have the potential to swing mainstream users into being comfortable with viewing events on the social platform. 

"Premiering exclusive content on platforms such as Twitter can bring huge momentum to both the content, as well as to the live stream itself," said Tania Yuki, founder and CEO of Shareablee. "Game of Thrones demonstrated the power of going live from the red carpet before its Season 7 premiere in April. 

"The hit HBO series posted a video using Facebook Live and generated nearly 4.2 million views," she said. "But more importantly, nearly half of its 206,000 actions were comments indicating that fans of the show were engaging in real time, mostly asking questions that were relayed to the stars of the show to answer before they entered the theater to watch the premiere.

"It is among the 10 most-engaged non-celebrity live videos so far this year."

Roll out the red carpet 
Celebrities have the ability to pull in big crowds and excited fans for a variety of experiences. The premiere of Suicide Squad is an exciting launch for comic book and superhero film fans, which is a genre that tends to draw big crowds. 

Fans were able to tune into the live stream by clicking a link on Twitter provided by Buzzfeed and the Suicide Squad?s official accounts. The feed was powered by Buzzfeed and allowed users to interact on Twitter seamlessly without having to leave the feed. 


Buzzfeed shares link to live feed video on Twitter

The broadcast premiered yesterday at 6 pm EST, and showcased the variety of celebrities attending the event showing off their fashion and featuring interviews. Well-known Buzzfeed personalities Keith Habersberger and Zach Kornfeld hosted the feed in a similar manner to a traditional red carpet premiere on network programming. 
Users were able to comment in a box located within the same screen as the live feed, but also view other discussion that was happening on Twitter in real time. The red carpet premiere ramped up hype for the film?s worldwide release today. 

Twitter?s comeback 
The live video feed is the latest in its attempt to capitalize on the growth in popularity of mobile video, after a string of disappointing revenue years, but its slowly making its come back. 

During its second-quarter earnings call, Twitter revealed that its mobile advertising comprised 89 percent of total advertising revenue, up 18 percent year-over-year and signaling the potency of targeting on-the-go users on their most frequented social networks (see more). 

Through the streaming video launches, Twitter is on track to become a significant competitor to major television networks as it also recently partnered with Major League Baseball and National Hockey League to bring weekly live-stream viewing for games to out-of-market fans and nightly sports highlights that tap trending data (see more). 

"Hopefully, it means extending the reach of Suicide Squad into new viewers interested in the genre, who are also the kinds of viewers likely to be influential to others by virtue of their massively engaged social activity," Ms. Yuki said. "With BuzzFeed being among the most active Facebook Live partners, we expect to see high viewing velocity and viewer engagement on this and other Twitter live-streams as well."