Twitter has hired Todd Swidler, former senior vice president of video and partnerships at Bloomberg, to run its live video business
Kurt Wagner / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's video bench has been thinning for two years: Glenn Brown, who oversaw the video ad push, left for Betaworks, and Head of Video Baljeet Singh departed months later, alongside broader media-leadership exits. The hire lands three weeks after [[a:918550|Twitter partnered with Bloomberg Media on a 24/7 ad-supported live news channel slated for fall]].
Pulling Swidler from inside that same partner — where he ran video and partnerships as SVP — means Twitter is staffing its most important content bet with someone who built relationships on the other side of the deal.
First-order effects
- Swidler now owns Twitter's live video business at the exact moment it must deliver the Bloomberg 24/7 channel, giving the partnership an internal operator who knows Bloomberg's video organization firsthand.
- The hire fills a leadership vacuum left by the departures of Singh and Brown, whose roles covered the video product and video advertising respectively.
Second-order effects
- Hiring from a launch partner rather than a rival platform signals to other media companies that Twitter deals come with operational commitment, making future exclusive-channel negotiations easier to staff and close.
- Bloomberg gains an ally inside Twitter who understands both sides of the economics, smoothing execution of the fall channel launch and any follow-on programming.
Third-order effects
- With video ads later accounting for $287M+ in a single quarter and over half of Twitter's total revenue since Q4 2017 per Recode's overview, sustained video leadership stops being a product line and becomes the company's core revenue engine — which is why the post-2015 exodus made this rebuild necessary.
- If the pattern holds, platforms competing for premium live content will increasingly recruit executives directly from media partners, blurring the line between distribution deals and talent acquisition.
The trend: Twitter is rebuilding its media leadership by hiring from its own content partners, as live video and video advertising shift from experiment to the company's dominant revenue source.