Instagram Launches Reels
TikTok may have been launched back in 2016, but it didn’t pick up pace until last year, attracting the attention of users from all age groups and backgrounds to post short-form creative video content. Now, it seems that Instagram is challenging the Chinese app through a new feature of their own, Instagram Reels.
Instagram announced and launched their new feature the same day on August 5th, 2020, dropping the new feature to users in 50 countries including USA, Brazil, France, India, Germany, UK, Japan, Australia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, and others, according to a TechCrunch report. While it is only available in a limited number of countries (less than half), the hope is that in a few months’ time, it will reach the rest of the countries as well and will evolve for more features and time limits longer than its current 15-second limit.
Like the historic moment when Instagram launched Stories in competition with Snapchat to gain back their shifting audience, this move and its accompanying new feature are likely to steal back the drifting user base from yet another social media platform. This move comes at a fortunate time since there are threats that while Microsoft has been trying to acquire TikTok, the app itself may become banned in the United States of America.
Reels by Instagram lets its users capture short clips, put them together with emojis, greenscreen backgrounds, music, personal audios, and alignments into a total amalgamate of 15 seconds, directly accessible from the IGStory button. Recently, Instagram even changed the way the IGStory camera and screen is set up and moved all their other story features like Create and Boomerang into floating buttons on the left of the screen, leaving only Live and Story at the bottom in the scrolling buttons. Reels is the 3rd feature at the bottom of the screen, soon to hopefully join Live and Story for users in all other countries too.
Have you tried using the latest Reels feature yet? Send us your Reels and get a chance to be featured on our Feed!
Credits: Instagram
