
After the banning of Tiktok and 58 other Chinese apps in India, the demand for short video apps is increasing. This is the best time to grab this opportunity for the existing app companies as well well as to launch the new apps which provide a short video creation feature.
Though after the government banned TikTok in India other homegrown apps like ShareChat, Roposo, Chingari are also being used by the people of the country more, Instagram also takes the advantage of this situation and launches a feature of short video creation named “Reels”.
In Brazil, Germany and France are the countries where this feature is successfully tested. India is the next one.
This feature will be rolling out in India after 7:30 IST today. Just like IGTV, users will also have a Reels section on their profile page, where all their content can be viewed at once.
The feature Reels lets users create a video of 15 seconds or less. Users can also use creative filters on it, can share it beyond his/her followers. Similar to TikTok, Reels provide options like audio from Instagram Music library, speed, effects, and timer.
Shah says the product comes from the realization that 45 percent of videos on Instagram are 15 seconds or less. “We also realized that stories are not the only place where they wanted to share these videos as they wanted them to stick on for longer and be distributed beyond their followers,” he said in the video call.
The new feature lets users shoot video, add filters and music from Instagram’s catalog and share it beyond the platform. Users will be able to share Reels in Explore, and also on Feed with followers. There will be no monetization avenues for now.
To create Instagram Reels, a user would need to open the camera option in the app. After clicking on Reels from the bottom of the screen, the app throws up several easy-to-use tools to record and edit a 15-second video.
Creators can choose to use the in-app music tracks, or even use custom audio for their videos. There are also options to speed up or slow down parts of the video. There’s an Align option that helps creators maintain their position in front of the camera while recording multiple cuts in a single video. It also has an array of augmented reality effects that can be used to make videos more fun.
According to Facebook India Vice President and Managing Director Ajit Mohan, videos make up a third of all Instagram posts in India. Out of that, around 45 percent of the videos posted are of 15 seconds or less.
Calling Reels as the “future of entertainment,” Facebook’s Vice President of Product Vishal Shah said that the superior goal of Reels was to push Indian content creators and help them become potential “global stars.”
Instagram says that it has been working with popular content creators and public figures to populate Reels content. When the test starts rolling out, users can check out content posted by the likes of Ammy Virk (3.3 million fans on TikTok), Gippy Grewal (1.7 million), Arjun Kanungo (1.5 million), Radhika Bangia (5.4 million), RJ Abhinav (1.6 million) and Indrani Biswas aka Wonder Munna (630K subscribers on YouTube).
As of now, Instagram plans to learn more from the testing phase and from creators themselves. Monetization options are also expected to be introduced once Reels takes off in India. No official public rollout date has been announced yet.