Reddit is one of those social networks that has retained its original looks for over a decade now. For a very long time, they have been trailing other social networks in providing basic features like having a mobile app and having native image and video support.
Thankfully, Reddit has started to catch up to the competition. They released a mobile app, added native support for images and is also planning to roll out a refreshed user interface some time in the future.
Now Reddit is going forward to add one thing that is basic on other social networking platforms: Video support. According to Variety, Reddit will now get native video support which includes video uploading and video viewing.
“We are very excited to be launching video uploading and video viewing on Reddit,” Reddit’s VP of Product, Alex Lee was quoted by the publication.
According to TechCrunch, the feature was being beta tested among less than a dozen communities on the social network and now it it will become available across the “safe for work” communities.
Reddit users will be able to upload videos of upt 15 minutes in length and the video sizes are limited to 1GB. Compare this with the likes of Twitter, which only allows you to upload videos that are 140 seconds long and Instagram which has a 1 minute limitation on video. The supported formats for video will be MP4 and MOV.
Users will be able to upload videos to Reddit via the website or the mobile apps, where the latter will have a basic trimming tool. There will also a tool that will turn those videos into GIFs which is great since Reddit allows you to upload GIFs of upto 100MB in size.
Reddit is considered as the “frontpage of the Internet” and videos will surely rank high on its frontpage, which trickle down later on sites like Twitter. It could also mean that they want to capitalize on video ads which can be a new revenue stream for the social network.
