Dive Brief:
- Twitter last week launched a live video button and announced it will offer embeddable Periscope feeds, according to Marketing Land.
- The live video button rolled out to both the Android and iOS Twitter apps.
- Twitter also announced a partnership with video ad analytics firm Innovid to measure viewability, engagement, time spent and other metrics.
Dive Insight:
After the emergence of live video streaming app Meerkat two years ago, Twitter acquired Periscope to compete in the live video space. Meerkat's success was short-lived after going head-to-head with the Twitter-owned app, but Twitter and Periscope may now face a similar challenge with Facebook's ambitious move into live video.
Facebook has been making an especially aggressive push into video this year, including the launch of live video with its Facebook Live streaming video feature. Live video, of course, has always been a driving force of the Snapchat experience. Twitter’s move to make it easy to share live video on its platform is meeting a clear marketplace demand, while it may also help the social media platform work out any live streaming kinks in advance of the upcoming NFL season where it will be live streaming 10 Thursday Night Football games.
“For me, this is huge because this means we are totally breaking down the barrier [to] a live broadcast," Alex Khoshnevissan, head of business operations at Periscope, said about the embeddable videos. "You don’t have to have Periscope. You don’t have to know what Periscope is.”
Twitter’s analytics deal with Innovid offers marketers third-party verification of the platform's video advertising metrics, a service which Snapchat and Facebook had both initially been slow to offer advertisers. With the rise of ad blocking and debate over the merits of the in-feed auto-play functionality, viewability for video ads has been an area of contention in the online advertising space.
