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Twitter has announced that it will begin rolling out a redesigned video viewing experience on its platform that will allow users to watch video appearing on their feeds or tweets in a full-screen view. Users will also be able to vertically scroll from the full-screen view to watch more video content. The company has also made changes to the explore tab with an added video carousel feature along with tweets of user’s interest now appearing under a “Videos for you” section.
Over the next few days, Twitter will roll out the immersive media viewer with vertical scrolling enabled for iOS users using Twitter in English. Meanwhile, the video carousel feature on the explore tab is now available to both Android and iOS users in English, confirmed the company. The company, while making the announcement through a blog post emphasises that they intend to make Twitter ‘the best place for video’.
The company blog post also included an embedded tweet to actor Ryan Reynolds’ tweet that announced the teaser to his upcoming movie Deadpool 3, also staring Hugh Jackman. Twitter says that ‘fun movie teasers’ will be an important part of the media viewing experience on Twitter, through the blog post.
The move comes at a time when major social media companies like Instagram and YouTube have had a shift in strategy towards adopting TikTok-like short-video formats and UI for Reels, and Shorts respectively. However, Twitter has chosen to adopt only the UI elements of the video-pushing strategy seen on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Twitter had earlier tried to expand its incorporation of video into its platform by launching Fleets in November 2020. However, the company pulled the plug on this project just eight months after kickoff. Fleets looked to introduce a story-like feature first seen on Snapchat, and then eventually adopted by Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, users reported the Fleets feature on Twitter to be sluggish owing to technical glitches. Despite the company fixing these issues, the feature failed to gather much traction with users.