In 2016, Twitter acquired the streaming rights to NFL's Thursday Night Football, the keystone of a strategy to bring live streaming video – with rich Twitter integration – to the masses. While the internal team would build the web and mobile products, the company planned to develop products across the latest OTT hardware from Apple, Google, and Amazon. HFC became their technology partner for the premiere of the service, a mere 12 weeks away.

We kicked off with a visit to San Francisco where we embedded with the Twitter team to ramp up as quickly as possible, work through technical questions, and iterate on design as the backend integrations and logic were built out.

The app included content from Periscope, Vine, Moments, as well as Trending tweets, but the centerpiece was the live streaming video with a timeline of related Tweets. Twitter for tvOS and Fire OS shipped in September 2016 to positive press and user reviews, and top placement within the app stores. Apple named Twitter for Apple TV App of the Year for 2016. We continued to support the product until it was eventually taken in-house.