Social Rivals Beef Up Short-Form Video in Brief Window Without TikTok

Dan Meier 20 January, 2025 

TikTok returned to US phones on Sunday after what turned out to be an extremely short-term ban for the short-form video app. On the eve of his inauguration, Donald Trump said he would delay the TikTok ban and suggested the Chinese business enter a 50 percent joint venture with US investors.

But the 12-hour blackout was enough for rival social media firms to announce updates designed to fill the temporary void left by the ByteDance-owned service.

This morning, Elon Musk’s X announced a TikTok-style vertical video feed coming to the app in the US. “An immersive new home for videos is rolling out to users in the US today,” the company posted on Monday. The announcement was accompanied by a short video showcasing the “dedicated video tab” accessible via an icon at the bottom of the app.

Musk has sought to make X into a “video-first platform”, though his past efforts have tended to focus on longer-form content in efforts to compete with YouTube. The company also launched a CTV app last year, but has gone quiet since the beta launch in September.

The vertical video feed marks a shift back to short-form content; X made a similar announcement in 2022, when the company introduced a scrollable video discovery feature, alongside a video carousel within the Explore tab. But having the video feed in a dedicated tab is a clear attempt to emulate the TikTok experience, even if Donald Trump forgot to notify Musk that he was giving ByteDance a reprieve.

The battle for short-form video

In any case, other social media companies are looking to capitalise on the uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future in the US. Bluesky, the social media service designed to replicate Twitter (as opposed to X), also announced a vertical video feed on Sunday. Until now the company’s video offering has been limited, introducing the ability to upload 60-second videos in September 2024.

But the company has now launched a scrollable trending video feed in the mobile app, which can be pinned to the home screen. And the social media firm made no secret of its jumping on the short-form video bandwagon. “We had to get in on the video action too,” the company said in a post.

We had to get in on the video action too — Bluesky now has custom feeds for video!Like any other feed, you can choose to pin these or not. Bluesky is yours to customize.

[image or embed]

— Bluesky (@bsky.app) 20 January 2025 at 03:41

Meanwhile Meta has upated its Reels offering on Instagram, including extending the maximum video length to 3 minutes. The Reels feed will also include a tab where users can see their friends’ video activity. The feature, designed to increase the discoverability of video content, has been likened to the “Following” tab that Instagram discontinued in 2019, which surfaced friends’ activity in a manner some users found invasive.

Instagram has also launched a video creation app called Edits, which has been compared to CapCut, the ByteDance-owned video editor favoured by many TikTok creators. And again, the company stopped just short of explicitly mentioning TikTok in the announcement.

“There is a lot going on in the world right now and no matter what happens, we think it’s our job to create the most compelling creative tools for those of you who make videos for not just Instagram but platforms out there,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in the announcement video.

 

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A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

The Reels format itself was created in response to the arrival of TikTok, which drew younger users away from Instagram. Now Meta is hoping a TikTok ban will bring back eyeballs and advertisers; forecasts from eMarketer estimate that Instagram would receive 22.2 percent of TikTok’s reallocated US ad spend. But this morning’s news suggests the social video app could be harder to delete than its rivals may have hoped.

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2025-01-20T13:19:07+01:00

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