Twitter sets stage for video offerings

Twitter will now open up its platform to 10-minute video clips for premium users, announced Rishi Jaitly, vice-president of media, AsiaPacific, MiddleEast & North Africa. The social networking company, which has been trying to increase its video offering, said it would discuss and analyse with media houses and high-end users to give them the option.

The platform, with 320 million active monthly users as recorded in the third quarter, is quickly turning into a news dispensing platform and the company is proud of it.

"Tweets travel faster than earthquakes, we say. In fact, the US geological survey monitors tweets to predict seismic activity... I think the world and India's best live news experience comes from Twitter. I think, we are the best live news app in India...," he said.

The presence of Vines (six-second loop videos, just like gifs), Periscope (interactive videos where users can talk to broadcasters as it happens) and Twitter videos (30 second videos) has made it an extremely enticing platform for media companies.

"About 40 years of video is viewed on periscope everyday and 1.5 billion Vine loops are watched by users each day," Jaitly said. He said the company had not anticipated Twitter will turn into a newswire. "But it came as a pleasant surprise."