Mad with power after universally expanding the maximum video upload length to three minutes last month, TikTok is now reportedly testing out five-minute video lengths for users who want to create even longer-form content.
The news was first shared in a tweet by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who published a screenshot of a TikTok bulletin announcing that users will now have the ability to upload longer videos.
“Upload videos up to 5 minutes long from your device. Make sure you’re using the latest version of TikTok before trying out the feature on your app or tiktok.com,” the screenshot reads.
TikTok first began testing the three-minute upload times back in December of 2020 before rolling the feature out universally in July 2021. According to 9to5Mac, some users have reported the ability to upload videos up to 10 minutes long, which likely means that TikTok is testing out video limits of varying lengths before reaching a consensus on what works best.
TikTok is testing a longer 5 minute video upload limit ???? ???????? pic.twitter.com/qiRbJmHkma
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) August 25, 2021
TikTok did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment and we’ll update this post when we receive a reply.
The video social network is best known for hosting bite-sized, highly sharable videos that can be consumed in excess exactly because of their brevity, so it’s anyone’s guess how longer-form content will play among audiences with increasingly short attention spans. It should be noted that the platform’s most popular videos currently centre around a viral challenge where people severely injure themselves by falling off stacks of milk crates, which admittedly doesn’t demand the rigour of a long-form video format.
The news of the longer video upload lengths comes just a week after Navarra also reported that TikTok is set to deploy “TikTok Stories,” the Instagram-Snapchat-Fleets copycat feature that will allow users to post content that disappears after 24 hours. Although TikTok has confirmed that a Stories feature is indeed in the works, there is currently no set date for such a feature might become widely available for public use.