After ten years as the leading platform for real-time video-clipping that has brought television highlights online, the SnappyTV core functionality is being brought in to the Twitter Media Studio as LiveCut.
The Challenge
We started SnappyTV in my attic in 2010. It was an idea born out of our time working with premium content at Yahoo. They had some of the best sports, entertainment and news video on the internet but it always took 6, 12, 24 hours to be published. Why? What if that was 6, 12, 24 seconds? How could we transform the way TV highlights were brought online. Bringing the biggest moments to the biggest audiences brought to you by the biggest advertisers.
The Solution
The platform we created has turned out to be one of the most lucrative acquisitions Twitter has ever made. Eventually all TV content was available in real time with all major advertisers sponsoring highlights. Technically we figured out that anything that was broadcast to a Satellite could also be redirected to an AWS server and pre-rendered to six different bit rates optimized for web and mobile. Now we had to create an appealing and approachable experience to empower all our clients to embrace real-time video editing and publishing. We had the concept and the start of an amazing team. Now it was time to design and build it. We went through many sketches, wireframes and prototypes. We iterated and refined constantly while getting feedback and learning along the way. We tried and scrapped many iterations on user generated clipping, iPhone apps and various editors. We found out things we had never dreamt of. In the end we built the best instant highlight publishing platform around. It has many moving parts and we designed and shipped a live editor, video player, embeddable viewing experiences, an iPhone app plus an admin and super admin portal. SnappyTV has been a big part of Twitter's video solution moving forward. I'm very excited for the whole team. It was a wild and wonderful ride.
The Official Announcement
SnappyTV is joining Twitter! Together, we will create an even better platform for live, social content distribution.
When we created SnappyTV four years ago, we believed in the importance of mobile, as a way for people to share important moments, and in the value of social, so that people could experience those moments together. Over the years, we’ve developed a close partnership with Twitter –– we’ve worked together to make it easy for publishers to bring video clips to Twitter, both organically and with sponsors via Twitter Amplify, and we’ve also built Twitter data directly into our editing platform. Through this partnership, people have been able to turn to Twitter to view highlights from major events from world championships to TV and awards shows to Presidential elections, just to name a few.
With Twitter we will continue our commitment to maintaining an open platform for social broadcasting of live events, across a variety of digital platforms. 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.
A huge thank you to our customers, investors, board members and advisors including Josh Felser, Chris Redlitz, Dan Halabe, Paul Bricault, Brian Woods, Russ Fradin, David Pidwell, Leslie Gittess, Andy Boszhardt, Ben Lin, Don Ryan, Don Folgner and Tricia Iboshi. We couldn’t be more proud of this team and what we’ve accomplished thus far. And, we’re thrilled to join a fantastic team at Twitter and have the opportunity to accomplish even more together.
Check out the Twitter blog if you’d like to read more about the acquisition.
- Mike, Ryan, Steve and the SnappyTV Team