People

TikTok TV: ByteDance makes its move for the living room

ByteDance wants to bring TikTok to smart TVs, but experts say it won't be easy.

A smart TV

TikTok's foray into the smart TV world began close to a year ago.

Photo: Samsung

TikTok is getting ready to embrace the living room: The social media giant began experimenting with apps for a variety of smart TV platforms in recent months, offering users access to both their personal feeds as well as new, curated experiences.

These apps could help TikTok both broaden its audience and tap into lucrative online TV ad dollars. New devices could also be a boon to creators, help them experiment with new formats, and perhaps even aid the production of TikTok content. However, the jump to the bigger screen poses a number of challenges for a service that's thus far been synonymous with mobile, short-form entertainment.

TikTok's foray into the smart TV world began close to a year ago with an app for Amazon's Fire TV devices that is called "More on TikTok." That embrace of TVs was informed by existing behaviors of TikTok users, according to the company's U.S. head of product, Sean Kim.

"When people share their favorite TikTok videos with friends or family, they turn solo viewing into a shared, communal experience," he told Protocol via email. "With TikTok on TVs, we're bringing traditionally mobile-first content to the biggest screen in the home, giving users the opportunity to gather around TVs to enjoy [...] TikTok, together."

However, "More on TikTok" was just a modest first step. The app simply provides a curated collection of popular videos, with no option to log in and access personal feeds. That didn't go over well with everyone. The app's current average rating on Amazon's app store is 3.5 stars; a whopping 27% of users gave it just one star.

Undeterred, TikTok launched a more full-fledged app on Samsung smart TVs in December, followed by an app for Android TV devices in February; both apps combine personal feeds with curated collections. The apps are thus far only available in select European countries, but an expansion to other markets and devices is in the works, according to a TikTok spokesperson.

"We're excited to see how creators engage their unique TV audiences and how viewers bond with one another through the experience of co-viewing TikTok content," Kim said.

TikTok is facing a number of obstacles as it expands to bigger screens. The most obvious one is that all video on TikTok is vertical, which doesn't translate well to TVs. Navigation is another major challenge, as the TV remote is an imperfect replacement for the type of scrolling available on mobile screens. "Mobile is hyper fast," said designer Sanjiv Sirpal, who previously worked on mobile and TV user interfaces for companies like Hisense and Flextronics. "Having to juggle the remote will be a bit of a pain."

Aside from these technical challenges, there's also the question of whether people even want to watch TikTok in the living room, surrounded by family. "Couples might be in for a shock if they peered over each other's feeds," Sirpal said. A solution may lie in new story formats specifically designed for bigger screens, he suggested.

There are some examples for mobile-centric video services succeeding on TVs. For YouTube in particular, bigger screens have become a massive growth engine. In the U.S. alone, more than 120 million people watched YouTube on their TVs in December, according to YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. A quarter of those viewers watched almost all of their YouTube videos on TV.

This has been a big boon for YouTube's advertising revenue, as TV-based advertising typically sells for a premium. In Q1, Google generated a whopping $6 billion with ads on YouTube.

Replicating that success story won't be easy for TikTok, said former Viacom executive Andrew Rosen, who now authors Parqor, an industry newsletter. "TikTok and YouTube are two very different consumption models, most distinguished by TikTok's maximum content length of one minute," Rosen said. Google has also had a lot more time to innovate in the living room, he added. "YouTube has been on Smart TVs for longer than TikTok has been in the marketplace."

It's also still unclear whether the things that make TikTok special even work on TV. TikTok videos aren't just short and vertical, they also frequently elicit a response from viewers. "It is two-way, interactive consumption," Rosen said. "TVs offer one-way, non-interactive consumption, so it is less clear why that would be valuable to TikTok users at scale."

At least on that front, TikTok may get some help from consumer electronics companies looking to make TVs more interactive. This spring, Chinese hardware maker Mecool unveiled an Android TV-based streaming device that comes with an integrated camera. In addition to touting its video-calling capabilities, Mecool also specifically positions the device as a tool for TikTok creators, complete with a dedicated TikTok button on its remote control. But so far, Mecool has to run the mobile app version of TikTok on its device, as the company's smart TV apps don't support video uploads yet.

Asked about plans to embrace new device types, Kim remained noncommittal. "We're always looking for ways to add value to TikTok viewing experiences, and we'll continue exploring opportunities to make [the service] more easy, fun and accessible," he said.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep Reading Show less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep Reading Show less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep Reading Show less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep Reading Show less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins