Just before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, TikTok is expanding its footprint in the living room. The company launched its TV app in North America through a partnership with Amazon Fire TV earlier this month. Today, TikTok is launching its TV application to more TV platforms in North America, including Google TV and other Android TV operating system devices, as well as some LG smart TVs and Samsung smart TVs.
The TikTok TV app has redesigned this popular short video app for the big screen. Like its mobile app, the app can access the users For You and Following channels and a Discover page after logging in-introducing some of the most popular content of the entire service, including comedy, games, food, travel, sports, and animals, And other categories. However, unlike mobile phones, TikTok TV includes an auto-play function, which can provide continuous content without interruption. There, the user must swipe vertically to browse the available videos.
To accommodate vertical video on wider TV screens, the app displays a darker version of the video in the background to make the experience more visually interesting, instead of just using black bars to fill the screen space. Before today, the company has provided TikTok TV applications for Google TV and Android TV in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, but has not yet brought this version of the application to users in the United States and Canada. In addition, TikTok launched its TV app on Samsung TVs in the UK last year. Samsung said it will launch the app to most smart TVs in the US in 2021 sometime this year.
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TikTok now also said that the new TV application will be applicable to 2018-2021 LG smart TV models running webOS 4.0 to webOS 6.0. This expansion may enable TikTok to compete more directly with rival YouTube in attracting consumers’ attention. Today, Google’s video application has a place in the living room, and more than 100 million American users now watch YouTube and YouTube TV on their big screens. In addition, third-party research from eMarketer found that as of a report released in October 2021, more than half of U.S. YouTube viewers or 113.1 million people are now watching through connected TV devices.
However, many of these users may not pay attention to short content. The company said last year that in 12 months, the viewing time of more than 30 minutes of YouTube content has increased by more than 90%. This may indicate that TV viewers are interested in longer forms of video content compared to mobile users. As the TV application program progresses, this may be a factor in TikTok’s decision to expand its maximum video length to three minutes earlier this year.
TikTok said in its announcement that it already has more than 1 billion monthly users-of courses, this includes many markets that have not yet entered the TikTok TV application. The new TV application will be rolled out to supported platforms starting today.