Twitter has seemingly renewed its commitment to the second screen, revealing plans Thursday to acquire live video clipping and distribution platform SnappyTV.
“Our goal is to help publishers quickly share great moments from events so people can experience those moments as they happen,” wrote Baljeet Singh, a director of product management at Twitter, in a blog post. “As Twitter has grown as the companion to live events and broadcast media, SnappyTV will help partners and brands bring the best videos into the conversation, when it matters most.”
Twitter is positioning its platform as the place to be to watch broadcast events as they unfold, in real-time, through video. To that end, “as we continue to invest in video, it’s important for us to provide tools that make it easy for TV broadcasters, businesses and event producers to share high-quality videos.”
SnappyTV was already used by Twitter agency and brand partners for Twitter Amplify campaigns, the company claimed, which made owning the platform in-house a natural next step. Twitter earlier this week, in cahoots with Cannes Lions media-network-of-the-year winner Starcom MediaVest Group, released figures that stirred up some buzz on how Twitter-amplified ads perform in concert with broadcast spots.
Tracking 15 Starcom client campaigns, Twitter’s Social TV Lab determined such second-screen behavioral nuances as, only one-quarter of Tweets happen during commercial breaks while 27% of Tweet activity coincides with reality TV programming.
These sorts of discoveries are attractive to advertisers, many of which are determining the best ways to amplify television buys with down-to-the-millisecond social ad buys. Twitter’s experimenting with one-click video ad units for brands further underpins its moves to successfully crack video formats.
SnappyTV is only the latest in a string of standalone second screen-ish platforms Twitter has been stockpiling.
Just one year ago, the company acquired Trendrr, a company which tracked social engagement in conjunction with television content. Twitter has since moved in on Mesagraph and SecondSync, two smaller deals in social TV analytics, prior to its acquisition of native ads platform Namo Media just weeks ago. But, most notably, was Twitter’s acquisition of BlueFin Labs in February 2013, the deal that “started it all” for the social platform’s second screen endeavors.
Founded in 2010, SnappyTV was the brain child of former Yahoo GM of Video Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham, head of video engineering at Yahoo following its acquisition of Jumpcut, a video sharing community Cunningham founded in 2006. The premise of SnappyTV is bring cloud-based video creation, distribution and measurement tools to networks and content-heavy companies. Some of its customers include: NASCAR, Oracle, FOX and ABC News.
Despite the ground second-screen video platforms like SnappyTV have covered with broadcast networks (see AdExchanger story on SnappyTV’s work with FOX Sports), it’s still early days yet with regard to bringing linear TV programming into social video streams.
