Twitter is reportedly mulling over creating its own video hosting service, unnamed sources have told AllThingsD. The addition of a home-grown video hosting solution would further cement Twitter as a content company as opposed to a channel for quick-fire communication. The social network has already moved to allowing photos to be immediately uploaded on its own servers, so allowing videos next would be a logical next step. The only difference between hosting photos and video is that the latter would require much more bandwidth, which could prove challenging if Twitter doesn’t have the proper infrastructure to support it.
AllThingsD notes that the leap to video hosting would be very attractive for advertisers, especially now that Twitter is aware at how valuable Tweetviews are as opposed to follower counts.
“Owning that rich video experience has monetization upside. One source says building a more effective video player could be a way of better enhancing the company’s existing advertising products, namely the promoted suite,” the publication writes.
The only services that stand to take a hit from Twitter-hosted videos would be third-party services such as YouTube and Vimeo. Although Twitter would still allow videos uploaded to other services to be linked, an in-house Twitter video hosting service could lead to a drop in video uploads from them.