As the playoffs intensify, Bluesky announced it is a beta version that will test new features during the NBA playoffs.
An NBA game is in progress, but a red border with the “live” designation appears around posts from your NBA account. When a user clicks on their NBA profile picture, they will be redirected to the event they are advertising, even if it means moving them away from BlueSky.
“We’re not locking you in Bluesky,” Bluesky’s COO Rose Wang wrote in a Sunday post. “We want you to use Blueski to discover what’s going on.”
Under previous ownership, Twitter had attempted to stream live sports on the app, spending millions of dollars on licensing deals with sports leagues.
However, Bluesky, currently backed by Venture Capital, unlike most other platforms, does not rely on advertising to make money. This means that Bluesky does not have a direct financial interest in the time spent on the platform. In that respect, BlueSky can cheaply instruct users to watch sports elsewhere, rather than firing millions of people for the right to stream a particular game.
Wang confirmed that Bluesky will also test this feature in WNBA Games.
It’s wise for Bluesky to invest in its utility for sports fans. “Sports Twitter” (no one calls it “Sports X”) remains a valuable resource for fans to respond in real time when watching games or chasing trade rumors. Some sports fans have moved to Bluesky, while others have hesitated to leave the platform where there are still more active users who are talking about anything about the big sports news of the day.