Twitter experiment: Soon you could be attaching videos to your tweets with a hashtag

After all the buzz surrounding Twitter planning to buy Soundcloud, it looks like Twitter is more interested in experimenting with video. A new Twitter experiment has popped up in the wild, giving us an insight into the company’s plans for advertising on the site.   A Recode report shows what Twitter has planned with video content. The experiment allows users to attach a embedded video to their tweet by just using the right hashtag. The experiment surfaced on the iOS app for Twitter and comes up when you are trying to compose a new tweet. This particular experiment has begun with the new movie ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ and when you type in the hashtag ‘#amillionwaystodieinthewest’, Twitter shows you the option of adding a video presented by movie’s studio Universal. It must be noted that this is not a promoted hashtag, but rather a ‘presented’ video, presumably to promote the film.   The right hashtag throws up a screenshot from a short clip of the movie, and clicking on it, starts playing the video. You can then share the video through a tweet.   At the moment, this is just probably geo-locked to the US and is an iOS-specific test, but it could see a wider roll-out, if it’s any successful during Twitter’s testing phase. We believe this would make a great addition to Twitter, and can definitely enliven conversation on the platform by magnitudes. An added bonus (who are we kidding; it’s likely built with advertisers in mind) is for advertisers, who can use a promoted trend or hashtag and extend it to a video. And we all know how Twitter can build hype instantly, so one imagines videos going viral in a matter of hours.   A lot of things are currently unclear such as whether the embedded video eats into the 140-character quota and whether user-generated videos can also be attached similarly (if associated with a hashtag), or whether this is only intended for content creators and brands. If opened up for individual accounts, we could see a slew of video accounts on Twitter.