Threatened by the meteoric rise of Chinese short-form video platform TikTok, Meta-owned Instagram, and Google-owned YouTube have introduced new features to discourage their short-video app users from cross-platform sharing.
According to reports, when trying to download an edited clip to an iPhone in Instagram Reels, the audio from the clip just disappeared.
“It means if you want to export the footage from Reels to use in another app (like TikTok), you have to actually post the Reel first in order to save the sound,” reports The Verge.
It was possible recently to download the clip with audio and use it on TikTok.
Creators can still post the same Reels video to TikTok but they need to first upload the video to Instagram, edit it, download that clip and send it over to TikTok, Athe report mentioned late on Thursday.
On the other hand, when creators now make a video on YouTube Shorts, they will not be able to download the video and cross-post it to other apps without a “YouTube watermark”.
“If you’re a creator who downloads your Shorts from YouTube Studio to share across other platforms, you’ll now find a watermark added to your downloaded content,” YouTube said in an update.
“We’ve added a watermark to the Shorts you download so your viewers can see that the content you’re sharing across platforms can be found on YouTube Shorts,” the company added.
The new YouTube Shorts feature is being rolled out over the next few weeks on desktop, and the company plans to expand to mobile over the coming months.
