What is a PTV message?
Definition
PTV means push-to-video: the short round video note recorded by tapping the microphone button twice in WhatsApp. It plays in a circle, loops, and starts muted, and like a voice note it is its own message type rather than an ordinary video attachment.
In more depth
Video notes are capped at a minute, always square, and always rendered in the circular player, which is what makes them recognisable and also what makes them unsuitable for anything a recipient might want to scrub through. They exist for a specific social purpose: a quick human face attached to a message, which is why support teams and small shops use them for greetings and apologies rather than for instructions. Technically they are a video that must be square and short enough to qualify, and engines differ in how reliably they accept one produced outside the app. Because of that, and because a video note carries more weight than the same words in text, most automations are better off sending an ordinary video with a caption and reserving the round note for cases where a human really did record it. If you do automate them, transcode to a square aspect ratio first and keep the duration well inside the limit rather than at it.
In the Wapito API
On the wire it is the field type:
{
"type": "video",
"video": {
"mime_type": "video/mp4",
"file_size": 940112,
"caption": null
}
}On the official Cloud API
Meta's official API sends ordinary video messages; the round push-to-video note is a client feature and is not part of the Cloud API message types.
Wapito is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or certified by WhatsApp or Meta Platforms, Inc. WhatsApp is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc.
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