Details of Twitter’s YouTube rival video service discovered lurking online

Twitter’s native video tool isn’t yet a reality, but we now know a lot more about what the social network’s YouTube rival will look like.

Twitter first started talking about its video service in November, but had yet to reveal many details. But now, thanks to a little sleuthing by Twitter user Daniel Raffel, we know a whole lot more, including the fact that only members of Twitter’s Amplify advertising program will be able to include ads in their videos. The service is clearly meant to bring Twitter more revenue — and steal some ad dollars from YouTube.

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Raffel noticed today that Twitter had a FAQ for the video service hidden in plain sight — at video.twitter.com/faq. There, Twitter has answered a lot of questions about its forthcoming video service, albeit not when it will be publicly launched.

For starters, Twitter Video will support MP4 and .mov formats, and videos should use a 16:9 aspect ratio. It will also support .png and .jpg thumbnail uploads.

Users will be able to upload videos of up to 10 minutes long, Twitter wrote in the FAQ, and as of right now, there is no file size limit. The service will feature a Video Publisher tool, and users will select the “Upload” button in its dashboard when they want to post a video.

In a bid to compete directly with YouTube, Twitter will require that all videos be uploaded directly to, and hosted by, Twitter Video. That means, Twitter wrote, that the “same video that was uploaded to YouTube can also be uploaded to Twitter, but you cannot reuse the YouTube URL with the Twitter video player.”

Users will need to do all their editing prior to uploading their videos, as Twitter’s tool will not support editing.

Twitter clearly knows that its video tool will be used for advertising, although it says only Amplify members will be able to do so in the early days of the service. But Twitter noted that it will let all users measure video starts, quartile completion rates, and views as overall counts or “broken down between Promoted vs. Organic traffic.”

via TechCrunch