Tag Archives: Musical.ly

With IGTV, Instagram Targets the Mobile Generation

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The cool kids don’t hang out on Facebook anymore. So Facebook wants the cool kids to hang out on Instagram.

When Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, Instagram had less than 100 million users. Now the app counts one billion users, most of whom are millennials and digital natives, the demographic Facebook covets. Instagram continues to grow by making it easy and fun for users to tell visual stories, the language of the digital generation. Sometimes, Instagram copies Snapchat features as it did with the creation of Instagram Stories. Now Instagram is taking a page from YouTube’s playbook by offering longer-form video through the recently launched IGTV feature. Instead of having video limited to 30 seconds in length, users can create videos that are as long as 10 minutes (or an hour for larger, verified accounts). And Instagram is adding an important twist: the content is optimized for mobile.

A Mobile-First Experience

If you’re already creating Instagram main-feed videos and Instagram Stories, IGTV should be a snap to use. You simply hold your mobile phone vertically and record a video. Then you tap on the IGTV icon on your Instagram account and follow the prompts to upload and label the video. Note that when you record your video, you don’t hold the phone in horizonal fashion as you are probably accustomed to doing. That’s because IGTV is designed specifically for the way we naturally hold our phones and view content via the vertical format. IGTV videos look naturally rendered, taking up the entire screen rather than being bracketed by ugly, thick black borders that typically appear if you hold your phone vertically and create a video (which looks hopelessly uncool).

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said that the mobile format will set IGTV apart. “We’ve reimagined what video is on mobile,” he said in a livestreamed announcement. In a blog post, Instagram pointed out that by 2021, mobile video will account for 78 percent of total mobile data traffic – so a mobile-first video uploading and sharing experience is long overdue. Continue reading →

Musical.ly: A Proving Ground for Digital Natives

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On November 9, app Musical.ly made headlines when it was reported that Chinese media startup Jinri Toutiao was buying Musical.ly for between $800 million and $1 billion. The reported sale price was especially impressive since Musical.ly (based in Shanghai) was founded only three years ago. The news was also notable for many other reasons, among them:

  • Musical.ly is probably the first Chinese-created social app to penetrate the United States and has managed to operate independently of the Four Horsemen (Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook).
  • Musical.ly has demonstrated how to capture and engage the attention of Gen Z, the cohort of digital natives that is growing up mobile and app savvy.
  • The app has become a multimillion dollar powerhouse even though many casual observers have absolutely no idea what anyone really does on Musical.ly.

Musical.ly has often been described as a “lip-syncing app,” and indeed, the app permits its reported 60 million users to record elaborately staged lip syncs. But Musical.ly is a lot more than that. With its attendant app, Live.ly, Musers can broadcast livestreams of themselves hosting amateur shows where they engage with other Musers for hours at a stretch. Musical.ly is really a proving ground for digital natives to learn how to become self-made brands. The livestreams and lip syncs create ways for teens to figure out the art of engagement.

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