• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 20, 2016

Video on Twitter is about to get a whole lot crisper.

That’s thanks to its just-announced acquisition of Magic Pony -- a machine-learning startup that specializes in improving the look of low-resolution video in real time.

“Magic Pony’s technology … will be used to enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey notes in a new blog.

With London-based Magic Pony -- which reportedly cost Twitter about $150 million -- the social giant is getting 11 PhDs, and their respective expertise in the areas “computer vision,” computational neuroscience, and “deep learning.”

For Twitter, the importance of video can’t be overstated.

Increasingly, that’s because brands don’t want to buy advertising that lacks a strong video component, Adam Bain, chief operating officer at Twitter, said earlier this year.

Magic Pony’s team will be joining Twitter Cortex -- its existing team of engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers. Twitter Cortex came together courtesy of Twitter’s previous acquisitions. It bought deep learning start-up Madbits in mid-2014, and then AI startup Whetlab in mid-2015.

Taken together, Dorsey said: “Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter.”

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only tech giant investing in machine learning. Google just opened a new research group in Europe for exactly that purpose, while Microsoft just bought Wand Labs, -- a startup that builds messaging apps and the tech behind them.