• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 13, 2015

Twitter on Friday confirmed the acquisition of live-streaming app Periscope. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but previous reports put the sale at somewhere $50 million to $100 million.

Fittingly, Periscope confirmed to the deal in a tweet, on Friday. “You may have heard some news: It involves a blue bird,” the company’s official Twitter account quipped.

Video is clearly a priority for Twitter.

Earlier this month, the microblogging giant rolled out an embedded video widget for publishers. With the widget, publishers can highlight Twitter-hosted video on their sites. The new feature relies on the same JavaScript used to render Tweet buttons and embedded Tweets.

Long a growth engine for digital advertising, video has become increasingly key to the fortunes of social giants like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, video will drive Twitter’s advertising business in 2015, according to a recent report from the equity research team at J.P. Morgan.

In 2015, “Twitter … will likely become an increasingly important form of engagement for brands given the ability to communicate with consumers in real-time and now to utilize video more effectively on the platform,” the team at J.P. Morgan predicted.

Despite its promise, Twitter only recently introduced a video platform. Videos can be 30 seconds long and be uploaded, edited and shared directly from Twitter’s flagship platform.

At least on the surface, rivals say they welcome increased competition from Twitter and other video newcomers. At a recent industry event, Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s head of content, estimated the digital video market to be worth between $200 billion and $400 billion -- more than enough to go around, he said.

While estimating that a more modest $7.7 billion will go to digital video, this year, eMarketer suggested that 2015 is shaping up to be the year that social and video truly converge.