Originally posted at Devumi Blog, check em out! Had to share because this is big news for marketers and Devumi does a great job of outlining the details. Here is the blog:

Twitter video hosting has officially kicked off for a select group of verified users. This exciting development is a move by Twitter to help keep users on its service. Why only ever allow people to share links that send them away YouTube, owned by Google, when they have the ability to keep people on their service?

With shareholders expecting Twitter to turn a profit, Twitter video hosting may just be the move that does it.

The basics of Twitter video hosting as it is with their Amplify service

Amplify is a video ad service being geared up by Twitter. While it is separate from the Twitter native video hosting service soon to come, it can be assumed that they will be similar. You can read more here. The currentlimits on the Twitter video hosting services for their verified users are:

• Users can upload videos of no longer than 10 minutes
• MP4 and MOV video files are allowed
• It must be encoded in 16:9 format
• The must also be using the H.264 codec, and the AAC audio codec
• Users can select the thumbnail image that appears in the tweet
• The editing options are only for the title and a short (I’m guessing less than 140 characters) description

Once users begin uploading videos they will be able to get a number of useful stats to see how successful their Twitter video hosting efforts are. Statistics will include:

• Number of video starts
• Number of video completions
• A breakdown on how far in people watched it at intervals of 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%

There will be a much smaller data availability on the Twitter video hosting platform when compared to theYouTube Analytics dashboard. It should be enough to get users started as they beta-test with their first users.

When will Twitter Native video hosting become available, what can we expect?

At this time, there has been no official announcement. A recent article from Re/Code claims to know: http://t.co/sNyQfzU7N4

But there has been no official announcement from Twitter, other than their plans to launch it in the first half of 2015.

What we can say is that this move by Twitter will make Vine nearly irrelevant. Users have been using Vine to post videos, 6 second looping ones, directly to their Timeline without sending users away. I don’t have a problem with this, I found them obnoxious for the most part.

That’s about 95% of what is posted on Vine and making its way to Twitter. Not exactly a marketers dream.

Plans to make for Twitter Native video hosting

Users who are thinking of getting their Twitter native video hosting plan together should consider that Re/Code claims that videos will be given a shorter time limit than the Amplify videos above. Experiments with 20 seconds are what is being said.

Start thinking about what kind of video marketing you can get done in 20 seconds if you want to jump out of the gate and take advantage of Twitter native video hosting right after it launches.

For examples, let’s look at short, successful video marketing efforts on YouTube:

If you’re thinking of using Twitter Native video hosting when it kicks off, start thinking short!