Details Emerge About Twitter's Video Service To Rival YouTube

Back in November, Twitter confirmed that it would be launching its own video service akin to YouTube as part of its growth strategy. While a launch date wasn't specified, other than sometime in the first half of 2015, details about the service were skim to say the least. That is until recently, when Twitter user Daniel Raffel noticed a FAQ page for the video service was already available, revealing a number of details including file types supported and just how it plans to directly compete with YouTube.

Raffel discovered the information at the URL video.twitter.com/faq, and it's clear from the beginning that this new video service will be something completely different from Vine, the site/service for looping, 6-second mini videos previously acquired by Twitter. Unfortunately there's still no mention of a public launch date.

So, the basics are that the video formats MP4 and .mov will be supported, as well as .jpg and .png image files for thumbnails. It is suggested that videos should be in 16:9 aspect ratio, and they can be a maximum length of 10 minutes, however there is no limit on file size.

Twitter Video (the service's apparent name, going by the page title), will feature a publishing tool with an "Upload" button in the dashboard, accompanied by quick access to tweeting it, but users won't have any way to edit or schedule their videos, something that may change as the service grows. Videos that are tweeted will appear in-line on a user's timeline, much as YouTube videos do today.

As for competing with YouTube, videos for the new service are required to be uploaded and hosted by Twitter Video, so it won't be possible to use a YouTube video URL. However, Twitter mentions that users can put their video on both services, it will just need to be uploaded to each one individually.

VIA Venture Beat

SOURCE TechCrunch