TikTok and Instagram are very close to the streaming wars as competitive barriers blur

July 6, 2021: -TikTok is planning to extend the length of its videos to be more like YouTube. Roku seems to follow the Netflix playbook and invest in the original video.

Generally, the streaming wars are discussed as a competition between the enormous global legacy media companies Disney, Comcast’s NBCUniversal, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS, Discovery, and incumbent players such as Netflix and Amazon. The reason behind this is that the products are similar, that consist of films, TV series, and sometimes live news and sports.

But as television becomes delivered over the internet, the competitive lines amid the traditional media companies and online video services like TikTok, Google’s YouTube, Facebook’s Instagram, and Amazon’s Twitch are blurring. The differentiation that exists today, user-generated content vs. scripted, free vs. subscription, short-form vs. long-form, gaming vs. professional sports, is bound to dissipate over time as each company tries to dominant consumer attention.

“Although it’s still commonplace for consumers and industry execs alike to consider cable and to stream video services like  ‘TV,’ and platforms that include TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram as ‘social media,’ they’re the same,” said Kirby Grines, founder, and CEO of 43Twenty, a strategic advisory and digital marketing firm focusing on the streaming video industry.

“These binary labels are increasingly becoming antiquated every day.”

Netflix caught on to this last year when it listed TikTok as a competitor for the first time. In Netflix’s opinion, anything that interrupts Netflix usage, even sleep, is competition.

But there’s a reason why Netflix specifically called out TikTok. TikTok may have started as a user-generated music-dance video service, but thousands of creators earn salaries scripting videos for the service. These influencers are already becoming A-list celebrities for teenagers, and the crossover between TikTok and Netflix has already begun. It’s one of the reasons I suggested Netflix should seriously consider buying a stake in TikTok when it was temporarily forced into finding potential acquirers last year.

This isn’t the first foray into a video for Facebook’s Instagram, which launched IGTV in 2018 and TikTok-competitor Reels. This short-form video feature allowed Instagram users to create content with overlaid audio and augmented reality effects in August 2020. Instagram’s move toward showing full-screen videos in user feeds wants to capture more video advertising dollars while also developing more opportunities for its creators and giving users new entertainment options.