Instagram Reels, TikTok void and Ajit Mohan’s legacy
9 July, 2020•5 min
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9 July, 2020•5 min
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Editor's note: This week, social network Instagram rolled out Reels—a feature that allows its users to record and edit 15-second video clips—in the Indian market. A global experiment that Facebook has been conducting since late last year in a handful of countries, Reels has been designed to counter Bytedance-owned TikTok. Much like the latter, Reels allows its users to record videos with creative tools, audio, music from its recently created library, and some special effects. Launched within days of the Indian government’s ban on 59 Chinese apps including TikTok, the timing of this rollout is hardly a coincidence. (Facebook, of course, says that testing Reels in India was a natural progression.) First of all, the launch of Reels is pretty bad news for all the Indian social media apps that have been gaining traction over the past week and trying to fill the TikTok void. We wrote about the noise around creating an India-first social network in the previous edition of Things Change; now, it seems that Instagram is well-placed to take the cake. It has the technology, money and the manpower …
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