With social networking sites Viddy and Tout on the rise, Twitter has decided they want to build their own video service. Seems like a good idea if twitter can pull this off correctly.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean Twitter expects users to start using its homegrown solution for the bulk of the videos people share of the service. It still expects most people to post clips using links from sites like YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo.
People familiar with Twitter’s thinking say the switch would be a way of further refining Twitter’s consistency and user experience, better shaping how users encounter Twitter content. It’s Twitter’s theme over the past year. (Example: The LinkedIn situation from months ago.)
While these video services take some of the heavy lifting off of Twitter, they also create difficulties. For one, Twitter has no control over the changes others make to their products. Yet often, Twitter must deal with the fallout when these changes occur. So, say, a third-party Twitter developer screws something up for its users — those users don’t necessarily go to the developer with complaints, but instead take it directly to Twitter.
I’d imagine, too, that every time Twitter updates one of its clients, it is frustrating to configure the new version to work with a number of outside hosting services. Add in the fact that Twitter has clients across multiple operating systems, and it fast becomes a logistical headache.
It’s not only about tech problems, but creating better ways to make tweets richer. Over the past few months, Twitter has slowly, increasingly updated the product to be more media-friendly, with full photos, videos and snippets of news articles now viewable from within individual tweets themselves.
Owning that rich video experience has monetization upside. One source says building a more effective video player could be a way of better enhancing the company’s existing advertising products, namely the promoted suite.
