Twitter announced its development of a native video service this past November, signaling that the social media platform known for its handy use of the infamous hashtag, is upping its game in the social media wars .
The video player, which is due to be released in the first half of this year, will not have editing or scheduling functions in the initial release and will only support .mp4 and .mov file extensions. Rumor has it, however, that additional perks will be added as use of Twitter’s new functionality grows. Video can be tweeted directly from the Video Player’s dashboard. From Twitter's blog:
...[A]side from just watching video more easily on Twitter, you should be able to record, edit and share your own videos natively on Twitter too. Alongside short looping Vine videos, we think you’ll have fun sharing what’s happening in your world through native video. You can expect to see this in the first half of next year.
Twitter will host videos that are up to 10 minutes in length and, in contrast with the platform’s status limit of only 140-characters, will place no file size limit on the uploaded videos.
The lack of a size limit means more quality videos, but here’s the clincher: only videos hosted by Twitter’s service will be supported. This means vloggers (video bloggers) must upload their videos directly to Twitter rather than, for example, online video hosting giant, Youtube. Vine is a Twitter app, so it isn't affected by this rule.
The platform is obviously trying to get in on the online video hosting market share. If the video service succeeds, then Twitter hopes to bring more premium advertisers on board and along with them, larger online advertising campaigns.
The imposed limitation to Twitter's hosting services is, on the other hand, a potentially dangerous move. The exclusion of Youtube alone, which boasted 8 million views per day only one year after launch, might make some users feel inconvenienced.
For Twitter's service to take on a platform on which 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute means that they are going to have to bring something extra special to the table. While the service has not yet been released, there is no evidence in the pre-release FAQ of how exactly Twitter will do this. We'll all just have to wait and see.