Twitter continues TV push with purchase of SnappyTV

SnappyTV allows organizations to edit, share, and archive live video and TV programming in real time

It's no secret that the second screen is extremely important to Twitter's future. The company spent much of the last year doing everything it could to incorporate television into the network.

Twitter was not done yet, though. It has gone out and acquired live video-editing startup SnappyTV, it was announced via a blog post from Twitter on Thursday. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

SnappyTV offers a suite of tools that enable organizations to edit, share, and archive live video and TV programming completely within the cloud. The platform enables organizations to create, distribute and measure real-time promotional messaging delivered via social media channels.

"Messages are sent by the millions during prime time shows, live sports and breaking news. When you bring in social interactions around live streams, conferences and other events, this number grows exponentially," SnappyTV writes on its website.

"SnappyTV powers the clips of the biggest moments for sharing to the biggest audiences brought to you by the biggest brands."

According to Twitter, SnappyTV is already "widely used by brands and our media partners to share video clips on Twitter," and the two companies have worked together "into Twitter’s real-time conversation, straight from the TV to your mobile device."

Now that it has been acquired, the two companies will work even more closely together to "help partners and brands bring the best videos into the conversation, when it matters most."

On SnappyTV's end, the company will be able to enhance its product by using Twitter's resources.

"With Twitter we will continue our commitment to maintaining an open platform for social broadcasting of live events, across a variety of digital platforms," the company wrote in a separate blog post. "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. We will be able to further our goal of empowering people to share the world’s best moments."

Twitter and television

As I said earlier, Twitter has been making a big effort to incorporate live television into its feed.

Twitter premiered its TV ad targeting software in beta mode in May of last year, and then expanded to to all U.S. advertisers that run national television spots in July. The technology allows advertisers to engage directly with people on Twitter who have been exposed to their ads on live television. 

It works by identifying Tweets that correspond with that television show. Because the person was engaged enough to tweet about it, the company figures that they watched the ads as well (which, in all honesty, is a bit of a leap. It is more likely they were sending the tweets in question while the ads were playing). Twitter will then push out promoted tweets that extend those advertisements.

In addition, Twitter strengthened its position with TV advertisers by showing them, in a Nielsen study released in August of 2013, that tweets can drive higher ratings for their shows, and that those shows caused a spike in tweets. TV and Twitter, it seems, have something of a symbiotic relationship.

Twitter also made a number of acquisitions in this space as well.

It purchased real-time TV data company Trendrr to help make those ads more relevant. Then, in March of this year, it made two more social television purchases: Mesagraph, a French real-time search and discovery platform for social media; and SecondSync, a provider of social TV analytics solutions to the UK TV and Advertising industries.

Neither Twitter, nor SnappyTV, could be reached for further comment.  

(Image source: blog.snappytv.com)