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How will social influence video in 2015?

As we said at the end of last year, video will be a big theme for the coming year, and it seems that not every company is entirely happy to let YouTube continue to dominate the market. While YouTube competitors such as DailyMotion and Vimeo have had limited success, could social platforms change this?

Facebook revealed this week that in just one year, “the number of video posts per person has increased 75% globally and 94% in the US. And with people creating, posting and interacting with more videos on Facebook, the composition of News Feed is changing. Globally, the amount of video from people and brands in News Feed has increased 3.6x year-over-year. Since June 2014, Facebook has averaged more than 1 billion video views every day. On average, more than 50% of people who come back to Facebook every day in the US watch at least one video daily and 76% of people in the US who use Facebook say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook.”

Twitter is also rumoured to be expanding its video capability. While it is conjecture for the time being, the (rumoured) feature, will allow users to shoot, edit and post video directly through the app, is Twitter’s attempt to get more clips on the service — and more engagement. Right now, the only way for regular Twitter users (that is, not advertisers, or certain publishers and celebrities) to share video is to do so through Vine, Twitter’s standalone, six-second video app. This new feature is different from Vine, but it apparently has some similarities. With the native video tool, you can upload video from your phone’s camera roll, or shoot and edit video directly through the Twitter app, according to sources who have seen and used the feature. The videos will also have some kind of time limit similar to Vine. These sources say Twitter has experimented with a 20-second time limit on user-uploaded video. The goal for Twitter is to get more users sharing and creating video on the platform, which in turn could keep people using the product more regularly.

These announcements and proposals come as YouTube continues to gear up its own capabilities. They also beg the question: will social media become ‘proper’ media channels in their own right? The potential for delivering entertainment through social channels is evidently huge. YouTube is already the world’s biggest streaming service, arriving there by almost accident. With mobile and social continuing to eat into consumer attention, it makes greater sense than ever to deliver brand messaging via these more targeted channels. As the social/mobile audience grows, there will be lots of room to innovate with the formats and delivery of content. As more than 30% of Americans get their news from Facebook, the company has sought to capitalise on the opportunity by helping broadcasters develop new properties: in the United States, ABC News’ David Muir launched the World News Tonight Facecast, a 1-to 2-minute newscast produced solely for its audience on Facebook. The Facecast highlights three to five stories that are in the news with a mix of hard news and feature stories. The series is the first of its kind by a network news anchor on Facebook, and each episode averages 100,000 to 200,000 views.

As the development of YouTube has shown, there has already been lots of innovation in what would’ve traditionally been regarded as entertainment. Who would’ve thought that millions of people would be happy to watch somebody playing video games? Or look for a make-up tutorial? In a recent New York Times article, YouTube was estimated to have 300 million hours of video watched per day, which comes in at around 114 billion hours a year (and makes around 1 cent per hour). Despite this massive number it seems certain that Facebook and Twitter will present a challenge to YouTube’s near monopoly of user-generated content. With the reach of mobile and deeper integration of social, the democratisation of entertainment is set to grow even more.