The battle to be the best short-form video platform is well and truly heating up!
YouTube has officially made the Green Screen feature available in Shorts!
Green Screen allows content creators to use any eligible YouTube content as a background feature in their videos, using either the visual, audio or both from the original clip.
YouTube explains how it works via its support page:
“Green Screen is the latest way to remix with Shorts - building on Cut that began to roll out last month. With Green Screen, you can use any eligible YouTube video or Short as the background for your original Short video. You can create using both the audio + video or video-only if you choose to mute the audio.”
YouTube has brilliantly leant into its strengths to leverage its most valuable asset - the world’s largest bank of video content.
Giving short-form content creators the ability (and permission) to have the entire YouTube content base at their disposal is something that TikTok and Instagram can’t even come close to matching.
While TikTok focuses on original short-form content only, this unique offering from YouTube allows creators to mix-and-match long and short-form content, along with being able to lean on older existing content to cut through. It also allows creators to keep all of their content on one single platform, no matter the length, which is something Instagram has been attempting to replicate for some time now (think IGTV).
This update is the next chapter in the battle for short-form content supremacy. In recent weeks, TikTok has replaced its discover tab with the new friends tab and Instagram have extended its reels to 90 seconds. These are all very different updates, but each one is a showcase of the direction that each platform is moving towards in an attempt to be the dominant player in the trending space.
So who are you backing to become #1?
If you’re a Social Media Marketer, we would suggest not having a horse in the race, but creating content strategies that cover all bases across the entire range of platforms. You never know which one is going to pull ahead in the long run.
Establishing an early presence everywhere is so important to ensure you and your clients stay one step ahead, allowing you to cash in on your versatile and engaged audiences when the time is right!
Green Screen is currently rolling out in the YouTube app on all iOS devices - Android is expected to follow shortly.
