Twitter has announced that it will begin rolling out a redesigned video viewing experience to its platform that will allow users to view videos or tweets appearing on their feeds in full-screen view. Users will be able to scroll vertically from full-screen view to view more video content. The company has tweaked the Explore tab with an added video carousel feature, and tweets of user interest now appear under the “Videos for you” section.
In the next few days, Twitter will roll out an immersive media viewer by enabling vertical scrolling for iOS users using Twitter in English. Meanwhile, the video carousel feature on the Explore tab is now available in English for both Android and iOS users, the company confirmed. The company announced this Blog post Emphasizes that they intend to make Twitter ‘the best place for video’.
The company’s blog post also included an embedded tweet from actor Ryan Reynolds announcing a teaser for his upcoming film Deadpool 3, which also stars Hugh Jackman. Twitter says that ‘fun movie teasers’ will be an important part of the media viewing experience on Twitter through blog posts.
The move comes at a time when major social media companies like Instagram and YouTube have changed their strategy to adopt TikTok-like short-video formats and UIs for Reels and Shorts respectively. However, Twitter has chosen to adopt only UI elements of the video-pushing strategy seen on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Twitter previously tried to increase the inclusion of video on its platform by launching Fleets in November 2020. However, the company pulled the plug on the project just eight months after its kickoff. Fleets thought of introducing a story-like feature first seen on Snapchat and later adopted by Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. However, users reported that the Fleets feature on Twitter was sluggish due to technical glitches. Despite the company fixing these issues, the feature failed to gather much traction with users.
