After partnering with Amazon Fire TV last month, theapp Tv di Tiktok has arrived on new smart TV models in the United States and in Canada, from devices Lg (for platforms ranging from webOS 4.0 of 2018 to webOS 6.0 of 2021) up to Samsung, passing through those with operating system Android and for Google Tv. The application allows you to watch short and popular videos posted on the Chinese social network on the television in your living room. A screen that until now was used to zap among the paid contents offered by Netflix & Co, but also to take advantage of the free ones loaded on YouTube. So if Tiktok’s initiative aims to offer users the opportunity to see the clips together with family and friends, this has the indirect effect of widening the clash with YouTube on a different terrain from that of smartphones.
More and more people have become accustomed to broadcasting the videos on the Google-owned streaming platform on their televisions. In December 2020, in the United States alone, over 120 million people watched this content on the big screens at home. In March of that year, they were a little less, over 100 million. But similar trends have been recorded in other countries, from Brazil (40 million) to Canada (10 million), from the United Kingdom (20 million) to Japan (15 million). The latest application introduced by Tiktok provides a sort of additional schedule on TV that will compete with YouTube content to win users’ attention. Bytedance had already introduced this novelty for Android TVs and for Google TVs in Germany, France and the United Kingdom in February 2021. The application then became available in the UK for Samsung-branded TVs: the South Korean company then announced that this possibility would be extended to most smart TVs in the US during 2021.
Video
How YouTube Shorts works, Google’s novelty to beat TikTok
by Emanuele Capone
How the Tiktok TV app works
Once the application is installed on the device through Google Play, the user can log in using the credentials of the account already used on the smartphone. At that point we can select which content to see through the “For you” and “Following” feeds, but there is also the “Discover” page that allows us to browse through many contents and categories, from sports to travel, from animals to clips funniest. The vertical format of the videos is also preserved in the television version: the information relating to the video you are watching will be displayed on the right and left side of the screen, such as the title, the author, the number of likes and comments.
A battleground
Due to the pandemic we have spent much more time indoors between 2020 and 2021 and our habits have changed a bit. This has certainly contributed to the growth in the consumption of streaming content through smart TVs. However, it is a trend that was already underway and that, after the boom in PC and mobile video consumption, has brought us back to using television in a very different way than in the past, when everyone was watching the same programs at the same. now and in the same place.
Among the streaming services, Netflix is the one that holds the largest share of the US market (34.4 percent) according to data collected by Statista and relative to 2021. In second place is YouTube (27 percent), followed by Hulu (20.3 percent), Amazon video (13.6 per cent) e Disney+ (4.6 percent). A Google analysis also shows that more than 100 million people every month in the United States alone watch YouTube content on television, to the point that the tech giant has developed new services for advertisers that focus on videos viewed through connected TVs. to the internet. Another research, carried out by eMarketer, says that 113.1 million YouTube users in the United States, 52.8 percent of the total, watched the platform’s content on smart TVs in 2020: a number destined to grow and reach 130.8 million (i.e. 57.7 percent of the total) by 2022.
Given this trend, the new Tiktok application now available on the North American market adds a new competitor in the arena of visualizations made through smart TVs. Of course, users who prefer to watch longer videos will not give up on the content offered by YouTube: in the US, in fact, research has shown that the time spent watching YouTube content longer than 30 minutes has grown by 90 percent over a period 12 months. However, it cannot be ruled out that the growing popularity of Tiktok and the popularity of some content on the platform will no longer lead people to use the app through TV, especially after Bytedance’s decision to extend the maximum clip length to three minutes. doable. Further fueling the rivalry between the two platforms, already very strong on the smallest smartphone screens.
Last September, a report by the analysis company App Annie found that users of the Chinese social network spend more time each month watching content than YouTube in the US: in more detail, in June 2021 Tiktok subscribers had seen over 24 hours of clips per month, surpassing the 22 hours and 40 minutes viewed through the Google app. A difference that in the UK is even more evident, 26 hours on Tiktok versus 16 on YouTube.
However, these numbers are for Android devices only. Furthermore, YouTube maintains the record in terms of time spent on the platform ever, with more than 2 billion active users per month, over a billion hours of video viewed every day and more than 500 hours of content uploaded every minute. That said, however, even the growth of the ByteDance platform does not stop: Tiktok now boasts a billion active users per month, its subscribers have increased by 45 percent compared to the summer of 2020, and last May it was the most downloaded non-gaming application in the world, with 80 million new installs. These data help explain Google’s decision to launch the YouTube Shorts service, 60-second vertically shot clips very similar to Tiktok’s.
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