The Twitter-owned Vine wants to make it clear that they are here to stay when it comes to digital consumption of media. While the iOS and Android app has been gaining steam and getting more popular by the day, as celebrities and media figures use the service more to reach additional users in a quick and consumable format – Vine has been hard at work making changes to highlight the best Vine has to offer.
This week Vine announced two major updates that would be making changes to the way people consume information on the video network. It starts with HD video, and ends with getting more exposure for their top-performing talent. Gaining more exposure for their top talent is something that has been a priority since the inception of the format. Just like Google’s YouTube, a major part of the Vine experience, is seeing the content that has gone “viral” on the platform.
Kristian Bauer, who is a Vine iOS Engineer pointed out in a blog post on behalf of the company that, “With this release, we’ve also introduced a new quality setting that you can use to have your Vines posted in HD. Tap on the Settings gear from your profile page, and then tap on “Your Content” to see this new option.”
Vine revamping the ‘find friends’ search feature, as well as adding a suggested pages feature is something that really delivers well with users. It is something that can drive home a number of facts, and gives new potential to those who are working to better understand how the network works. It is far easier to understand what Vine is all about, if users are being directed toward content that has hundreds of thousands of loops already, and can see the app in action.
The HD aspect is impressive, but not completely impressive at the same time. The update brings the upload quality from 480p to 720p, which is an upgrade – but not something entirely interesting. It definitely is a nice marketing point, but isn’t necessarily something that everyone is going to take advantage of. At the end of the day, the quality of the upload will only be as good as the individual’s hardware who is doing the uploading.
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Twitter has struggled with Vine in many of the same ways that Twitter has struggled itself, which explains a big part of this update. Users are left asking themselves, “Why do I want to use this?” and instead of being shown exactly why the user should be using it – the platform is left rather ambiguously up to the user to figure out. This update to Vine definitely helps some, but it doesn’t necessarily solve all of the issues at play here. While Twitter and Vine have suffered from the same challenge in getting users to “understand” their platform, it remains a serious performer in the app world.
While this particular update is only available for iOS right now, it’s unclear how soon, or if at all, this update will become available for Android. That will likely make some users unhappy about the update, but Vine performs significantly better on iOS than it does on Android anyway.