Oliver Johnson
TikTok is testing allowing users to upload 60-minute videos, while experimenting with longer-form content.
The feature is in the testing phase and only a small number of randomly selected users have access to it, TikTok told CBS MoneyWatch. The company added that it has no immediate plans to expand capacity to its community, noting that it routinely experiments with features that do not become permanent.
A move by TikTok to adopt longer videos would increase its fierce competition with Alphabet-owned YouTube, which in 2019 launched Shorts, a section of the site that features videos less than a minute long.
To be sure, TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains cloudy after President Joe Biden signed into law in April that could lead to the platform being banned if TikTok parent company Bytedance does not sell its stake in the company within a year. TikTok and ByteDance earlier this month filed a lawsuit against the USA, arguing that the project is unconstitutional.
Facilitating much longer videos on its platform would mark a major shift for TikTok, whose explosive growth has been based on users posting short video content. TikTok has 170 million monthly active users in the US
When TikTok originally launched in 2016, videos were capped at 15 seconds each. But the company, which is owned by ByteDance, has since extended the length and currently allows all users to upload videos of up to 10 minutes.
In 2021, TikTok began allowing users to post videos longer than 60 seconds each. “With longer videos, creators will have the ability to create new or expanded types of content on TikTok, with the flexibility of a little more space,” the company said in a statement. blog post at the time.
Social media consultant Matt Navarra was the first to spot TikTok’s video test, posting an alert he received from TikTok on Topics, a text app from Meta. “Upload videos up to 60 minutes long! Make sure your app is up to date and try uploading from your app or desktop to tiktok.com,” the alert said, according to Navarra’s post.
Enabling long-form videos is a way for TikTok to get users to spend more time on the app while discouraging them from leaving the platform to find that type of content, Navarra told CBS MoneyWatch.
“The algorithm will make sure they deliver what they want to see,” he said. “I think TikTok will find people within the platform who want long-form, and those who don’t won’t see it.”
It would also allow Netflix and other streaming services that can release films or TV series exclusively online to promote new content on TikTok, he said.
