Amid all the talk about Instagram removing likes, the popular social media app recently unveiled a new feature that copies one of TikTok’s key features. Instagram users will now be able to record short 15-second video clips with music attached.
Instagram is continuing its trend of “borrowing” the best features from other social platforms by mimicking Chinese social media upstart, TikTok. According to a report from Techcrunch, Instagram is now testing a ‘video remix feature’ that allows users to post 15-second videos with music onto their story.
The new feature is called Reels and was rolled out on Tuesday as a test for Instagram users in Brazil. The new feature is an exact replica of the posting format that helped popularize TikTok and make it major competition for Instagram and Snapchat among younger users.
The posted Reels can then be viewed within Instagram’s Explore page under ‘Top Reels.’ If a user doesn’t feel like sharing their Reel publicly, they send them through a direct messaging – a key difference between Instagram and TikTok. It remains unclear if Reels will be rolled out to other countries. But Instagram reportedly has been working on a similar feature that may soon be available to users across the globe.
The new features called Scenes allows users to mix music into video and post to their stories in addition to letting them use augmented reality effects and adjusting the playback speed. The new feature was discovered by tech researcher Jane Manchun Wong who is well-known for finding tests inside major apps through her knack of reverse-engineering.
Instagram is working on Scenes, a TikTok-like video editing/remixing tool for Stories
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 12, 2019
Other users will be able to remix your "Scenes" if your account is public
You are given music, video speed, timer, AR Effect, etc to edit each clip
This feature is previously known as Clips pic.twitter.com/5y1DGACFis
