ESPN and Twitter widen their deal for in-tweet video highlights

Twitter would really, really like to make ad-driven TV experiences central parts of its service, and it just confirmed that laser-like focus through an expanded deal with ESPN. The sports broadcaster will soon show in-tweet video highlights of football, soccer and the X Games; Twitter, in turn, gets a guaranteed volume of promoted tweets to parallel ads inside the videos themselves. While we're not looking forward to the new marketing pitches when they surface in the year ahead, we'll be happy if we can catch more replays without losing our place in the social stream.