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Tencent-backed Kuaishou launches short video app for global audience – and it looks similar to TikTok
- Kuaishou is China’s second-largest short video app, after ByteDance-owned Douyin
- Its new offering, Snack Video, closely resembles Douyin’s international counterpart TikTok
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Tencent Holdings-backed Kuaishou Technology, which operates China’s second-largest short video platform after ByteDance-owned Douyin, has released a new short video app targeting users outside China that closely resembles TikTok, ByteDance’s international version of Douyin.
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Snack Video, which is Kuaishou’s second international offering after Kwai, is available on the Google Play app store. Early users and reviewers have pointed out similarities between the new app and TikTok, from its all-black theme to its search function which recommends trending accounts, just like TikTok’s “Discovery” feature.
Snack Video users can post videos up to 57 seconds long, compared to TikTok’s 60 seconds. Like TikTok users, Snack Video users can add friends from their phone books or other social media apps such as Twitter as well as start group chats. It also uses a content recommendation algorithm that shows users videos similar to those they have interacted with, another feature TikTok is known for.
Kuaishou and ByteDance are two of the biggest players in the lucrative short video market, which was worth more than 100 billion yuan (US$14.1 billion) last year in China alone, according to Qianzhan Industry Research Institute. In the first two months of the year, Kuaishou reported that its eponymous app in China had 300 million daily active users, while Douyin reported 400 million daily active users.
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“The features and user experience of SnackVideo are more similar to TikTok than Kwai,” said Zhang Yi, chief analyst at consultancy iiMedia Research. “It could be a move for Kuaishou to try to expand its existing user base to the likes of TikTok’s by imitating it.”
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