Twitter to live stream U.S. Presidential debates via Bloomberg partnership

Twitter will be live streaming all of the U.S. Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, beginning Monday, September 26. The streams will come from Bloomberg TV’s live broadcast, and are part of the partnership the social network announced with Twitter earlier this year.

Streams of the debates will be available via Twitter.com, as well as on its various native apps via Moments and through the @bpolitics Twitter account, including the just-launched Apple TV version which is tailor-made for video. In addition to the debates, the streams will also include a 30 minute block of Bloomberg Politics programming before and after each one, which will feature talking heads providing commentary and analysis.

Following the first Presidential debate on Monday, the schedule include the Vice Presidential debate on Tuesday, October 4, and then the second and third Presidential debates on October 9 and October 19 respectively.

Twitter is touting its role in modern politics as part of the reason it’s the ideal platform for this, since it says tweets related to the Democratic and Republican primaries earlier this year received over 1 billion impressions, and also notes that 10 million tweets crossed the internets during the first Presidential debate of the 2012 cycle.

I still think Twitter ultimately wants to become the next incarnation of live TV, and this should help them prove whether or not they’re ready to assume that mantle. By the same token, any issues could make the case that it’s not ready for prime time, so this should be interesting to watch both from a politics, and from a tech business perspective.