Twitter said it has renewed its deal with Major League Baseball and will offer live streaming of out-of-market games weekly starting Thursday (April 5) when the Texas Rangers take on the Oakland Athletics. 

The games will be available free in the U.S. for Twitter users at @MLB and via live.twitter.com/MLB.

Financial terms were not dislcosed.

The live stream will be a simulcast of one the teams’ local broadcast.

Twitter will be making advertising packages available to sponsors.

MLB will also make real-time game highlights available for fans at @MLB on Twitter throughout the season. Spanish-language highlights will be available at @LasMayores.

To help fans embellish their baseball Tweets, Twitter and MLB have created special hashtag-triggered emojis for all 30 teams. Fans can join the conversation by Tweeting to their favorite MLB teams with a unique hashtag-triggered emoji all season long.

[embed]https://twitter.com/MLB/status/978311870288363520[/embed]

Research company Canvs is adding Instagram to the social media it studies to gauge emotional responses among viewers for its TV programming and advertising clients.

Canvs also said it has figured out how to read and analyze emojis, giving it extra insights into what young Generation Z consumers are feeling. Harnessing that information about emotional responses has proved powerful in predicting program ratings and commercial recall.

Adding the fast growing social-media platform to the company’s current data from Twitter and Facebook provides clients with a more balanced look at social media activity, Stuart Schwartzapfel, Canvs chief strategy officer, said.

Much of Instagram’s content is visual, making it more difficult to quantify and analyze posts than on Facebook or Twitter.

“It is heavily visual, but there is a scalable amount of commentary, either in the form of rich text or emoji usage that we’re seeing as pretty scalable on Instagram,” Schwartzapfel says.

Canvs found that about half of the messages on brand pages — including those of TV networks — include emojis, making understanding them imperative.

Canvs’s data science team did a study across Instagram and social media at large to understand which emojis are most prevalent, and it identified 1,000 emojis that are most commonly used.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Despite the perceived waning of simultaneous second-screen use during TV viewing, a new study by Twitter suggests significant engagement among TV viewers plus extensive reliance on emojis to portray their feelings about what's on their TV screens.

In a corporate blog,Joe Cruse, a Twitter senior data specialist, summarized findings of the research, which showed about 14% of all TV-related Tweets contain at least one emoji character, up from 9.8% in April 2014, when emojis were first introduced on Twitter.

The use of emojis -- expressive and detailed icons that are descendants of the Web's "smiley face" image -- may represent the ease of quickly sharing feedback about what's being seen on TV.  It's certainly less distracting, from a user's perspective, than typing a personal comment. Cruse said emojis let fans "discuss what’s happening, how they feel about what they’re watching or add context to their live-Tweeting."

The genres that generate the most emojis are music (22%), drama (21%), reality (20%), children and family (19%) and "specials" (18%). Considerably less Tweeting happens during movies (11%), sports events (10%) and news (3%). 

The most popular emoji during dramas was "tears of joy."

Twitter's study did not identify emoji usage based on specific programs or channels, but Cruse noted that one episode of 106 and Park, the popular BET music series that ended its 14-year run last December, helped boost the music category. 

"On average, 27% of Tweets [to "@106andPark"] ... had at least one emoji, and at [the show's] peak, one episode saw 63% emoji usage," Cruse said.

Emoji fans skew young: 86% of emoji users are 24 or younger, with nearly half between 18 and 24. Women represent 57% of emoji users, compared with 43% men.

"Emoji Tweets occur in a pattern very similar to overall TV tweets," Cruse said -- it tracks the popular viewing hours: "Of the Tweets posted during primetime, over 15% of contain at least one emoji. Overnight and early morning see the lowest density of emoji Tweets," about 5%."

Approximately 9% of daytime TV Tweets included emojis, possibly triggering the higher female skew overall.

In addition to the popular "tears of joy" emoji, frequently used icons included "clapping hands" and "heart-eyes," plus the judgmental "pile of poo," which, notably, are often used during competition reality shows.

"With so many performance and skill-based reality shows, Twitter audiences like to cheer on their favorite acts with virtual applause and standing ovations," according to Cruse's analysis. "Official accounts for these shows often use emojis in their Tweets to rally fans to show appreciation for contestants."

"Face with tears emoji" was this year's Oxford Dictionary "word of the year."