Elon Musk just lately promised that new Twitter video updates would be coming through thick and fast, and he’s undoubtedly holding true to this, with two new video updates now being rolled out to Twitter customers.
First off, Twitter’s long-awaited picture-in-picture (PiP) playback window is now lively on all platforms, enabling you to maintain viewing a video clip as you scroll by way of the app.
That’ll make it simpler to multitask in-stream, versus, say, watching in your TV display whereas additionally scrolling by way of tweets. Which may additionally assist Twitter improve its worth as a singular leisure and data answer, versus being, historically, a supplementary ingredient.
I imply, in lots of instances Twitter’s already the first supply of consideration for customers all through the day. However whereas ‘second-screening’ has been a key development amongst Twitter customers for years, Twitter has by no means been capable of successfully faucet into this conduct, and maximize consumer engagement primarily based on a number of inputs.
Twitter has tried alternative ways to integrate video content with tweets, within the hopes of merging the 2, and changing into a extra ubiquitous single platform.
However whereas the idea of viewing tweets and streaming content material on a single display does seem to make sense, generally, customers have to date been extra aligned with conventional discovery and consumption behaviors, and utilizing Twitter in-between, in advert and recreation breaks.
If there’s a method to merge the 2, that might certainly make Twitter a extra beneficial platform, and picture-in-picture could possibly be one method to make this a actuality. And perhaps now, customers will really be extra receptive to having a number of feeds on display – particularly whenever you additionally contemplate the rise of traits like ‘sludge’ clips on TikTok, which current numerous transferring elements inside a single show.
Prior to now, this will have been overwhelming, given our alignment to singular video feeds being introduced to us, by way of a TV or film display. However perhaps now, consumption behaviors have shifted sufficient that customers will really be extra open to the PiP show, and it may resonate stronger with Twitter customers.
Twitter will definitely be hoping so, on condition that it’ll be trying to make video content material extra of a spotlight beneath incoming CEO Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino’s expertise is in TV streaming, and plainly that is the path that Twitter’s now heading in, with Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter exclusive show set to be the primary cab of the rank on this new push.
Turning into extra of a hub for all kinds of stories and leisure could possibly be a extra viable development path for Twitter to observe – particularly if it could actually persuade information retailers to start out broadcasting on to the app. And with the following US election cycle developing, that might assist to reinforce the deal with the platform, and get extra customers spending extra time on the app.
On one other entrance, Twitter’s additionally now experimenting with a native video download option on the app.
Many customers have been requesting this for a while, and once more, with Twitter set to place extra deal with video content material, this could possibly be one other beneficial addition to its presentation and manufacturing pipeline.
In isolation, every of those updates – together with variable playback speed controls and 1080p uploads – could appear comparatively minor, whereas the best way through which Twitter’s rolling them out, with out fanfare, may additionally reduce their potential impression. However collectively, Twitter’s making important investments into bettering its video service, which, as famous, seems to be set to grow to be a key ingredient of the following stage of Elon’s Twitter 2.0 push.
