Twitter Releases Video-Clipping Tool LiveCut. What Does It Mean for Sports-Video Pros? The social-media platform will also be shutting down SnappyTV at the end of the year By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Monday, July 22, 2019 - 1:09 pm
Print This Story
Story Highlights
Twitter grabbed the attention of many in the content-creation game last week with the announcement of its new live-video-editing and -distribution tool, LiveCut. The cloud-based web application allows quick editing and sharing of video highlights of a live stream occurring from one's own Twitter account.
It's a move that the social-media giant has been chatting about since acquiring a similar technology in SnappyTV back in 2014. It was in 2017, however, that Twitter actively spoke about shutting down Snappy and introducing its own replacement.
Last week, Twitter introduced LiveCut, a web-based application for editing of highlight clips from a live stream on the social platform.
Now that time has come. So, what does the move mean for sports-video content creators?
At first glance, users will find a video clipper very similar to that of SnappyTV but one baked seamlessly into a more comprehensive video ecosystem offered by Twitter, known as Media Studio. For that reason, Twitter Product Manager Kevin Cohen, who is overseeing LiveCut, recommends it not be considered simply a like-for-like replacement of SnappyTV.
I think LiveCut brings a lot more to the table in comparison to SnappyTV, he says. All of your broadcasts [in Media Studio] are going to be available to be clipped in LiveCut, which is very different from SnappyTV, where you needed to send a stream to Twitter and another stream to SnappyTV in order to clip from it. That was too much of a burden, especially for groups like [sports teams], who in their postgame press conferences needed to do two streams at once. We're bringing that functionality, and I think that's going to be really beneficial for partners.
The usability of LiveCut sticks to the roots of what made SnappyTV popular with digital and social-video content distributors: its no-frills UX was easy to learn (or teach), and it's free. Those factors became very obvious to the design team as they worked through user research with partners who were heavy users of SnappyTV. Sure, Twitter could have loaded LiveCut up with a world of new features, but much of the user feedback received indicated that clients wanted them to keep it simple.
Using LiveCut, as with SnappyTV, is fairly straightforward. You can set an in and an out on your live timeline, add in some metadata (such as a title and short description), compose your tweet, and quickly publish a video to your account. We wanted to honor some of those design principals such that there was some familiarity with clipping in this new product, says Cohen.
It's the integration within Twitter's Media Studio where content distributors will find some new value to play around with. With LiveCut, users can live-clip any piece of video content that either is currently live or has been either posted to one's Twitter account or captured using a Twitter-based means, like Twitter's new camera or Periscope. LiveCut will also house all consumption metrics, like video views, time spent watching, completion rate for videos on an account.
The integration of the whole thing, I think, is the game-changer, says Cohen. Media Studio really becomes that one-stop shop for all of your publishing needs across Twitter. Media Studio for a long time has been a great source for managing all of your content across Twitter for monetizing it and analyzing it. Over the last year or so and now with the introduction of LiveCut, we have really bolstered the efficacy of our live product within Media Studio, and we've started to feel the impact of that not just from sports partners but also those on the advertiser side who are becoming more and more content creators in and of themselves.
Are there plans to expand on LiveCut and offer more tools and options for super-users, who might want to get more bang for their buck in their live clipping for Twitter? Sure. According to Cohen, this version of LiveCut is definitely a version 1.0, and Twitter believes deeply in the value the product brings to content creators of its platform. Investment in LiveCut will continue. Next iterations will depend on user feedback after a few months of use in the field.
There were critical principles to the product that we heard from our partners on and learned from our usability sessions; we wanted LiveCut to be fast, simple, and free, says Cohen. We chose to invest in that as early as possible. Keeping in mind, we have super-users like big sports leagues and collegiate athletic departments that want the robust features and functionality, but we knew we needed to nail those principles off the bat, and that's where we focused our attention at first with the understanding that we will continue to iterate on the product.
Twitter also found it very important to release the product over the summer, most notably to allow its many collegiate-sports partners to get their hands on it prior to the start of the new athletics season in August. Also, although SnappyTV will be shutting down, it won't go dark until the end of the calendar year.
We wanted to ensure that our partners had a really long lead time in getting familiar with LiveCut and slowly transitioning over to using LiveCut from SnappyTV, says Cohen. I felt it was really important that we offer our partners around six months or so to have that opportunity to transition.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
31/08/2025
Legrand | AV, a global specialist and industry leader in audiovisual solutions, returns to CEDIA Expo 2025, taking place Sept. 4-6 in Denver, with a powerful li...
31/08/2025
Global media technology company Backlight will unveil new capabilities in its Iconik, Wildmoka, and Zype product lines at IBC2025 (booth #1.D09), September 12 1...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
Twitter Releases Video-Clipping Tool LiveCut. What Does It Mean for Sports-Video Pros? The social-media platform will also be shutting down SnappyTV at the end of the year By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
