TikTok is testing a new landscape mode with a small group of users worldwide.
The Chinese-owned app that popularized portrait-style films with 15-second snippets has recently extended to allow for lengthier recordings of up to 10 minutes. This modification is expected to help the platform compete with YouTube, which just introduced its own Shorts (60-second films) to compete with TikTok.
Users who can access the new horizontal mode will notice a “full screen” button on square or rectangular films in their feed. When you press the button, the video will transform to a landscape format.
After analyzing data from 400,000 households, TechCrunch showed in July that children and teens spent more time viewing videos on TikTok than on YouTube. Qustodio, a manufacturer of parental control software, conducted the study.
TikTok initially beat YouTube in terms of average minutes of use per day among young people aged four to 18 in June 2020.
TikTok bans are being proposed
Despite the app’s enormous popularity, US Republican Senator Marco Rubio unveiled bipartisan legislation to prohibit TikTok citing security concerns, including fears that it may be used to spy on Americans.
“It is troubling that, rather than encouraging the administration to conclude its national security review of TikTok, some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically motivated ban that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States,” a TikTok representative said in a statement.
The representative added that the company would continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that are “well under way” to “further secure our platform” in the US.
In 2020, then US-president Donald Trump tried to ban the app but lost a series of court battles.
