Elon Musk not too long ago promised that new Twitter video updates would be coming through thick and fast, and he’s positively 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 might additionally assist Twitter improve its worth as a singular leisure and knowledge resolution, versus being, historically, a supplementary factor.
I imply, in lots of circumstances Twitter’s already the first supply of consideration for customers all through the day. However whereas ‘second-screening’ has been a key pattern amongst Twitter customers for years, Twitter has by no means been capable of successfully faucet into this habits, and maximize consumer engagement based mostly on a number of inputs.
Twitter has tried other 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, normally, customers have to date been extra aligned with conventional discovery and consumption behaviors, and utilizing Twitter in-between, in advert and sport breaks.
If there’s a technique to merge the 2, that would certainly make Twitter a extra priceless platform, and picture-in-picture could possibly be one technique to make this a actuality. And perhaps now, customers will really be extra receptive to having a number of feeds on display – particularly once you additionally think about the rise of tendencies like ‘sludge’ clips on TikTok, which current numerous shifting components inside a single show.
Up to now, this may increasingly have been overwhelming, given our alignment to singular video feeds being offered 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 might resonate stronger with Twitter customers.
Twitter will definitely be hoping so, provided that it’ll be seeking to make video content material extra of a spotlight underneath incoming CEO Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino’s expertise is in TV streaming, and it appears that evidently that is the course 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 reports and leisure could possibly be a extra viable development path for Twitter to observe – particularly if it may well persuade information retailers to begin broadcasting on to the app. And with the following US election cycle arising, that would assist to reinforce the concentrate on the platform, and get extra customers spending extra time within the app.
On one other entrance, Twitter’s additionally now experimenting with a native video download option in the app.
Many customers have been requesting this for a while, and once more, with Twitter set to place extra concentrate on video content material, this could possibly be one other priceless addition to its presentation and manufacturing pipeline.
In isolation, every of those updates – together with variable playback speed controls and 1080p uploads – could seem comparatively minor, whereas the way in which during which Twitter’s rolling them out, with out fanfare, might additionally reduce their potential impression. However collectively, Twitter’s making important investments into enhancing its video service, which, as famous, appears set to change into a key factor of the following stage of Elon’s Twitter 2.0 push.
