Twitter Now Lets You Upload Video Via The Desktop

Uploading video to Twitter is no longer a mobile-only process. Starting today, users can upload video from the desktop.

Your phone shouldn’t have all the fun. Videos can now be uploaded to Twitter via web! ? https://t.co/4Q4rpzUmPh pic.twitter.com/AdqK2U9SRQ

— Twitter (@twitter) October 8, 2015

To tweet a video within twitter.com, users can click the “Media” button and upload either a photo or video. Videos are limited to a 512MB file size and 30 seconds. If the video is longer than 30 seconds, a trimming tool opens to allow people to edit it down to the proper length. Video uploaded via the Web must also be MP4 format. Mobile uploads can also be MOV. More technical details are available here.

Twitter advertisers and partners have long been able to use a Web interface to publish video on Twitter, but this is the first time it’s being offered as a consumer-facing tool. It should be a handy feature for marketers who manage their social campaigns from the desktop.

The new feature should increase the amount of video uploaded to the network and the time watched, something that’s obviously in Twitter’s best interests as a business. Twitter is playing catch-up to Facebook — and of course YouTube — in social video, but seems to be hitting its stride in 2015. After launching mobile video uploading in January, it purchased live streaming video app Persicope, which after less than six months reported that more than 40 years’ worth of video is watched on Periscope daily. Midyear, the company made video autoplay, and that has apparently paid off in more views. Twitter hasn’t released view stats comparable to Facebook’s four billion a day, but this week, a Twitter executive said more than 370 years of video are watched on Twitter daily (that’s nearly 200 million minutes, or about 38 seconds for each of Twitter’s 316 million users).

And today, Twitter made a move to monetize more of that viewership, announcing an extension of its Amplify program to give publishers and video creators an easier way to add pre-roll ads to their content. Read more about that here: Twitter Testing YouTube-Like Video Advertising Model With New Amplify Offering