Elon Musk on Wednesday shared an unplanned broadcast stream on his Twitter feed, signalling that the microblogging platform is working to improve the quality and overall experience of its live streams. The billionaire entrepreneur also shared some insights into the advantages of native video uploads on Twitter.
The video, marked by incredibly low resolution, showed Musk sitting at the Twitter office in San Francisco, California, US, chatting with his colleagues who were showing him the various features of Twitter’s broadcast feature.
When you watch a live stream, if you double tap anywhere on the video on your mobile app, you will automatically ‘heart’ — or send floating heart emojis — the video, much like how you can share ‘hearts’ on Instagram live streams. This feature left Musk in splits, who also enquired if any other reaction could be added for users. There’s no option to help add comments from users on the live stream.
Musk further added that in order to get your video boosted on Twitter, it’d be a good idea to upload videos natively to the platform. He said that any videos posted natively will see a better boost than any external links, “because way more time is spent watching a video than clicking on a link.”
The CEO said that the more screen time users spend on checking out posts (text, photos, or videos), the more boost it gets.
He went on to recommend that users should upload videos that are longer than 10 minutes in 480p resolution, “as the resolution is fine for phone/laptop users.”
In classic Twitter tradition, Musk’s surprise broadcast attracted hilarious reactions (and some comparison with popular live streaming app Periscope) from users and followers in comments.