Dive Brief:

• The teams at Twitter and Vine announced that the video-looping app will not be shut down completely as previously reported, but instead be converted to a “pared-down” app called Vine Camera, per a company blog post.
• Users’ six-second, looping Vine clips will be downloadable through the app or the vine.co website, and will also be available to post to Twitter going forward.
• The move was reportedly made following input from content creators using Vine, but might also stem from a failure to find a buyer for the app. Venture Beat pointed out that downloaded videos from the Vine website include captions, number of likes, comments and revines, something that the download file from the app doesn’t include

Dive Insight:

Just last week, Twitter finally integrated live streaming for users via Periscope tech, and the additional incorporation of Vine onto its main platform shows the site is doubling down on video heading into 2017. Twitter became an early leader in the live social video space this year through a variety of media deals, including partnerships with every major sports organization, but competition has heated up of late with Facebook building out both its own Live offerings and streaming options for Instagram Stories. The more recent moves puts more video creation capabilities in the hands of users.  

While Twitter previously stated it was completely shuttering Vine, rumors of potential acquisitions valued as low as $10 million surfaced in early November. The move to now reconfigure Vine as a smaller part of the main Twitter site suggests a viable buyer never emerged, mirroring Twitter's own failure to find an acquisition suitor following reported talks with Google, Salesforce and even Disney earlier in the fall.    

So far, Twitter looks to be banking on a video-focused future as much of media attention and spend migrates to newer players like Snapchat, which is arguably a successor to Vine. For marketers, live video is an interesting content type for reaching an audience but the venue to find that audience matters as well. Twitter, on the whole, appears to be majorly reconfiguring its business model, not just in terms of content but also on the advertising front, as the company will kill off lead generation campaigns and cards starting early next year.