Twitter working on YouTube rival: reports

Twitter is said to be working on a video service to rival YouTube, though the product is not yet ready.

According to reports, Twitter recently had a FAQ for the video service, in which the company announced its intent and answered many questions about the upcoming service. However, it had not mentioned when it planned to launch the service.

According to reports, Twitter wished to get some part of the play from Google's YouTube and only members of Twitter's Amplify programme would be allowed to post ads in the video service.

The new video service would initially allow users to upload MP4 and MOV files.

They would also support PNG and JPG thumbnail uploads, but all videos would need to comply with the 16:9 aspect ratio. Twitter further revealed that even as the video files were not limited by file size at this juncture, users would only be allowed to upload 10-minute long videos when it was finally out.

The service would also feature a video publishing tool to help users upload videos easily.

The micro-blogging network had revealed more features about its native video service as part of its bigger strategy to position itself as a media platform.

The Twitter Video Player would not support videos hosted on YouTube or anywhere else IANS reported. Only videos on its own service would be supported.

While advertisers and other commercial partners may use the Twitter Video Player, Twitter would not allow third parties to sell access to the Video Player, or to embed other advertisements, sponsorships, or promotions on it.

Users would have a degree of control over how the video was presented to users in timelines by way of a customised thumbnail.

Further though it looked like while the time limit was 10 minutes, Twitter was hoping for those to be quality 10 minutes.

Videos would be tweetable from the video player`s dashboard but it would not be possible to schedule videos "at this time".