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Week in social: IGTV goes horizontal, YouTube subscriber counts, and Snap music licensing

27 May 2019 Cassandra Megraw

IGTV now supports horizontal videos

A year after its launch, Instagram has announced support for horizontal videos on IGTV—the former horizontal-only video platform. In an effort to endear video creators, publishers and brands to the long-form video section of the app, viewers will now be able to rotate their phones or tap a button to expand a horizontal video to play at full screen in landscape mode. Though the active user base for IGTV has been growing after a slow start, Instagram is still making an effort to push the platform more into the mainstream and satisfy the requests of users.

“We’ve heard a lot from creators that [IGTV’s lack of support for horizontal videos] is a constraint that’s been problematic for some of them or some types of their content,” said IGTV product lead Ashley Yuki.

YouTube is changing how subscriber counts are displayed

After some dramatic back and forth between YouTube influencers, which had fans watching follower counts rise and fall, YouTube appears to be setting things straight by changing the way real-time subscriber counts are displayed. Rather than seeing a YouTuber’s exact subscriber count down to the digit, viewers will see an abbreviated number (for those with 1000+ subscribers). Announced last week in a blog post, the reasoning for the change is to “create more consistency everywhere that we publicly display subscriber counts.” The change will take play in August 2019, and the platform has said that creators will still be able to see their exact number of subscribers in YouTube Studio.

The reaction so far: tears. (Read the comments ?)

Facebook has taken down over 2 billion fake accounts this year

During the first quarter of this year alone, Facebook has taken down 2.19 billion fake accounts—almost a billion more than the last quarter of 2018.

In a blog post, Facebook said “the amount of accounts we took action on increased due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time.” It also added that it is estimated that around 5% of monthly active accounts aren’t real (that’s around 119 million fake accounts that are live on the site). Alex Schultz, Facebook’s VP of Analytics, said: “We have two main goals with fake accounts: preventing abuse from fake accounts but also giving people the power to share through authentic accounts. We have to strike the right balance between these goals.”

Snap is looking into licensing music for users to embed in posts

There’s nothing like music to get the party started and Snap is in talks with Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music to license music and help its users party harder in their posts. Any deal struck would give users access to a broad range of songs to past on Snapchat—a feature also available on Instagram Stories and TikTok. With the prevalence of these platforms, songs and artists are now able to gain even more popularity and momentum when used in everyday posts. For example, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has been #1 on the Billboard Top 100 for several weeks, first gained popularity on TikTok as a meme.

Amazon is apparently working on an emotion-detecting wearable

If you’ve ever had someone tell you to calm down when you were angry, then how would you feel having a piece of technology that tells you how to act based on your emotions? That’s how one might imagine Amazon’s latest reported creation: a wrist-worn gadget that’s able to detect your emotional state via your voice and offer suggestions on how to better interact with other people. ?

According to internal documents, the Alexa team is said to be working with the group that created Amazon’s Echo smart speakers on the project, and a beta test is said to be underway.

Stay tuned: you could be wearing it in a few years, or never hear about it again.