Sports fans should be pleased to learn that their Twitter feeds are now more useful for catching up on game highlights and replay video clips.
Today, streaming video platform Ooyala announced it will offer support for Twitter Cards, Twitter’s new standard for adding rich media (videos, pictures, articles) into tweets. ESPN is the first client to take advantage of Ooyala’s Twitter Card support, so ESPN videos are now embedded directly into a tweet when sharing a link. (See screenshot below.) Users can watch the video from their Twitter stream rather than having to navigate to the sports giant’s website.
The new Twitter Card integration seems like a win for all parties. Twitter will undoubtedly get its sports fan users to spend more time browsing their Twitter stream, while ESPN gains yet another platform to share its content.
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While several media services use Twitter’s Card API — including Flickr, Soundcloud, New York Times, Foursquare, and WordPress — there is a certification process before the integration goes live on Twitter’s website. So it makes sense that Ooyala would want to offer support, since many of its clients produce premium video content that can benefit from wide distribution channels.
“ESPN is sort of the perfect example to show what kind of [content] publishers can choose to expose through a Twitter stream,” Ooyala Project Manager Brian Theodore told VentureBeat. “The obvious approach is to share their entire library, but our Card API support means they can target their video content around a Twitter audience.”
The Twitter Card integration will also allow Ooyala to give its clients better analytics on content consumed on the social network, new advertising opportunities, and improved video discovery. The company said it hopes to offer its Twitter Card support to other clients in the future.
Top photo via ESPN
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