As the clock ticks toward its Sept. 15 deadline to find a new owner, TikTok has made the jump to TV screens.
Unlike WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal, the shortform video platform made it through negotiations with Amazon to secure a spot on Fire TV for its new long-form streaming app, More on TikTok. The app begins rolling out today across Fire TV devices, per Business Insider.
Nick Tran, who left his spot as Hulu’s VP of brand culture and marketing in April to become TikTok’s head of global marketing, told BI the move was sparked by a recent increase in “co-viewing” thanks to the pandemic.
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“We know that during this time a lot of families and people are engaging together, as a collective group, to watch anything entertainment,” he said. “We see a lot of co-viewing and it’s harder to do that on a mobile device, so we wanted to bring another outlet for them to watch it all.”
The fact that TikTok is using TV screens to capture that shared viewership isn’t unique. YouTube especially has been leaning hard into TV viewership; it revealed at this year’s NewFronts that users now watch a whopping 450 million hours of its content on TV screens each day, up from 250 million last year. And, almost immediately after launch, Quibi changed its entire distribution strategy to embrace TV viewing thanks to a mass outcry from users frustrated with being restricted to their phones.
There is one thing about TikTok’s TV play that’s unique, though. With YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, and pretty much every other video service out there, TV apps are an extension of their mobile apps. Users can watch half of a video on their phone, then swap seamlessly to finish it on their TV.
More on TikTok isn’t like that. Instead of being a TV-screen-sized of the usual TikTok experience, where users flick through millions of individual videos, the Fire TV app’s library is a collection of themed playlists and compilations of popular videos curated by TikTok. It also has longer-form videos, including two original productions: In the Studio, a series of minute-long interviews with celebrities; and This Is TikTok, which profiles some of the platform’s top creators.
All of this content is served up without any kind of personalization or recommendation algorithm, because users don’t log in. More on TikTok doesn’t distinguish between viewers; it serves everyone the same mix of trending content.
Tran told BI that the TV app is “unique in the sense that you’re not interacting with it.” He added, “You’re leaning back and consuming it all.”
Viewers won’t, however, be consuming ads. More on TikTok is ad-free–at least for now.
In addition to offering co-viewing, More on TikTok will be used to test how people watch different projects, such as tonight’s live The Weeknd concert. TikTok has boasted that the event (beginning at 8:30 p.m. in its apps) will be a “first-of-its-kind virtual music experience” with special effects that sound a lot like Fortnite’s Travis Scott performance.
As for why TikTok chose Fire TV, Amazon told BI that “mobile-first” video services–apps that originally were only available on smartphones, then expanded to TVs–have seen a 70% increase in watch hours from January to June. In the same time period, mobile-first apps gained twice as many new users as other Fire TV apps, it said. (It also noted that YouTube is “consistently” one of the top five Fire TV apps by total watch time.)
Amazon said it expects this growth to continue after pandemic lockdowns end.
