It may not be long before TikTok’s trademark short videos get a bit of a time extension.
The company is reportedly toying with the concept of allowing users to record videos that run up to three minutes in total, which would mark an additional two minutes from the current maximum.
This feature is also in its early access stages and TikTok has not fully confirmed whether or not when this change might be rolled out.
As of now, the minute-long videos have helped to catapult the video site to immense popularity. This timeframe places it as longer than Vine but shorter than most videos on YouTube.
Whether or not this will be a good idea or not for TikTok remains to be seen.
The brevity of its videos now lends itself to various strategies and adding an additional two minutes would certainly be a major change across the platform.
TikTok was founded in 2016 and has since grown to 2 billion mobile downloads across the world as of October with 130 million of those downloads coming in the United States.
The good news for TikTok with a big decision like this looming is that there is some precedence for changing the length on a platform to fit with changing times.
Many might remember when YouTube limited the videos on its growing platform to less than 10 minutes.
Twitter did something similar on its platform when it allowed users to tweet twice as many characters as it did before when it switched the maximum from 140 to 280 characters.
Both of these platforms seem to be doing just fine today.
One thing is for certain for TikTok. After a long and drama-filled year that has put the Chinese-based owner of the platform, ByteDance, in the spotlight, 2021 will most certainly be another year full of key business decisions.
Messing with the most basic and core components of the platform could backfire or on the other hand could even bring in more users.
