Bottom line: If there’s one thing we’ve learned about social media over the past decade or so, it’s that people generally don’t respond positively to sudden, over-reaching change. Fortunately for the ByteDance-owned video-sharing platform, they seem to be experimenting with the new option on a very small scale.
TikTok is reportedly in the process of rolling out the ability for creators to record and share videos up to three minutes in length, which is three times as long as the current 60-second limit.
😮 TikTok is rolling out ability to upload longer videos of up to 3 minutes long 🤳🏻 pic.twitter.com/9ifs7s7Uh3
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) December 2, 2020
We’ve seen time and again where experiments like this blow up in a developer’s face for myriad of reasons.
Take short-form streaming video platform Quibi for example. The service launched earlier this year from industry vets Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman with plenty of financial backing. The entire premise of the platform was built around the idea that people could watch videos in short chunks on the go, but the pandemic more or less ruined that game plan and prompted a shutdown after less than nine months of service.
TikTok has a good thing going for it and while most will agree that you need to constantly be innovating to avoid falling behind the times, perhaps tinkering with something as paramount to the service as video length might not be the best idea. We’ll see how it plays out.
Masthead credit: Daniel Constante
https://www.techspot.com/news/87821-tiktok-experimenting-longer-form-videos.html
