Twitter Acquires SnappyTV, The Popular Live Video Platform

 

In a continuing effort to assist users, brands and publishers with increasing their level of connection, Twitter has agreed to buy SnappyTV.  The service is a popular platform for live-clipping, editing and distribution of video across the Web and is already a common choice for many of Twitter’s brand and media partners via its Amplify ad program.

“Together, we’ve worked with the biggest content partners to inject video content into Twitter’s real-time conversation, straight from the TV to your mobile device,” explained Baljeet Singh, director of product management at Twitter, in a recently published blog post.

SnappyTV was founded in 2010 as a cloud-based platform that lets users quickly edit and share clips from TV broadcasts.  Many brands are already using the platform, which is expected to grow exponentially as a result of the acquisition by Twitter.  “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,” Twitter wrote in its blog post.  “To that end, we’ve agreed to acquire SnappyTV.”

Twitter plans to invest in SnappyTV as a stand-alone product as well as further integrating the service into its own platform.  This deal is the latest initiative by Twitter to establish itself as a social TV service as a way to boost engagement as well as attracting increased television ad revenue.

The investment in SnappyTV adds to Twitter’s growing partnerships that are expected to drive TV viewership.  Twitter recently agreed to purchase Namo Media and pair their respective native advertising technology.  The Namo deal followed Twitter’s acquisition of MoPub last October.

SnappyTV explained its side of the deal in a blog post, writing that, “With Twitter we will continue our commitment to maintaining an open platform for social broadcasting of live events, across a variety of digital platforms.  Joining Twitter will allow us to provide an even better product and bring the platform to more content owners and event organizers throughout the world.”

Social media advertising revenues are expected to skyrocket in the U.S. in the near future, with a forecast from BIA/Kelsey recently predicting growth from $5.1 billion in 2013 to $15 billion in 2018.  The research firm claims that most of this growth will come from Facebook’s News Feed ads and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets.

Twitter is clearly making moves to capitalize on the projected growth, attempting to increase its market share and keep users on its platform for longer on each visit.  It has been reported that Twitter recently considered making a bid for SoundCloud but backed out over pricing concerns.

Twitter continued explaining its plans for SnappyTV in its blog post, writing that, “While we continue to invest in SnappyTV’s product and integrate it more tightly with Twitter, we also plan to maintain our partners’ ability to post high-quality videos to other platforms.  Our goal is to help publishers quickly share great moments from events so people can experience those moments as they happen.”