Twitter, Hollywood Working on In-Stream Video Series
Forget the debate over whether Twitter wants to get in the media business. Twitter wants to be a media player. — The San Francisco, Calif.-based company, along with multiple Hollywood producers and network execs …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after MediaMemo warned that Twitter risked 'rival[ing] ad players' by moving onto advertisers' turf (tread carefully), the company has stopped hedging: it is working directly with Hollywood producers and network executives to develop in-stream video series. The pickup was unusually broad for a platform story — NYT Bits framed it around the media-or-technology question, with CNET, Business Insider, VentureBeat and others following within a day.
The move lands alongside other July 2012 signals that Twitter is building an advertising business worth feeding: new targeting options for Promoted Tweets announced the same week, and confirmed work on letting users retrieve and search old tweets — the archive that would make the timeline more valuable to both users and sponsors.
First-order effects
- Hollywood producers and network executives gain a new commissioned-content buyer whose inventory sits inside a real-time conversation stream, giving their shows a distribution surface no cable network can replicate.
- Twitter's Promoted Tweets product gets premium video adjacency to sell against, converting the timeline from a text-and-link feed into a slot-based video ad environment.
Second-order effects
- YouTube and Facebook face pressure to answer with their own exclusive or co-produced series, since a platform that commissions content can command brand budgets that pure aggregation cannot.
- TV networks' calculus shifts from treating Twitter as free second-screen promotion to negotiating whether their programming feeds a rival's first-screen video business.
Third-order effects
- If platforms keep commissioning original video, the media-company-versus-technology-company distinction that investors and regulators use to classify these firms erodes — a question NYT Bits raised the day this story ran.
- Content rights could become the next competitive axis among social platforms, following the same path from user-generated feeds toward licensed and owned programming that defined earlier web video players.
The trend: Social platforms are evolving from distributors of other people's media into commissioners of original video, with Twitter's Hollywood partnerships marking its entry into that race.