It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep users engaged and interest in this world where the majority have a varying degree of Attention Deficiency Disorder (ADD). People no longer have the patience or interest to read through strings of texts. To keep users engaged, social media have had to come up with various multimedia ways to entice users; first, it was pictures, but the ultimate tool is proving to be videos.
No wonder Facebook with all its portfolio (Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook itself) is hell bent to port as many videos as possible to its platform. Mostly to topple the industry’s veterans like YouTube.
But Twitter too is well on its way to give the two a good run for their money. Twitter has been in the past one year signing up streaming deals with various sporting leagues and associations as possible. Such as the $10 million deal it sealed with the U.S. National Football League.
In its quest to become people’s go-to platform for video streaming, Twitter in the next coming week will be opening up its API (Application Programming Interface) to allow outside services to directly connects to its network and stream video whenever they want.
Currently, streaming videos only appear on Twitter if they content creator had signed up a partnership deal with the social network. However, going forward, content creators will not need any special partnership deal with Twitter to stream their content on the network.
Although Twitter’s Periscope (bought in 2015) has attracted a considerable number of users, it is far from being said to be accepted mainstream. Apparently, these standalone video streaming apps are not working for Twitter as the company hoped. It recently had to shut down Vine, another standalone app for streaming.
Twitter is said to be changing strategy and dropping the standalone apps and going at it by bringing streaming videos directly into the network. There is word that Twitter is going to make a big announcement at the upcoming ‘newfronts’ digital media marketing event set to be held in May.
By running streaming videos directly, be it from sports leagues like the NFL, or TV networks or any digital creators. Twitter will be competing with Facebook and YouTube head-to-head.