Collab, Facebook’s new venture: Vie to TikTok

Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team announced last week that a new iOS application is designed to deliver a new approach to collaborative music making. The app is currently an invite- only on iOS. The app, which is currently in beta, let users create short-form videos split into three simultaneous sources, i.e., you can perform a single song by playing three different instruments and stitching it all together. Facebook says users don’t need any experience in music to add their own recordings. NPE’s announcement explained that the Collab users can create videos using their own recordings or by “swiping and discovering” other videos on the platform to complete their composition. Once a video has been created, it may be published on Facebook Stories, Instagram (also owned by Facebook) or on other social media apps.  While it's going to sound like Facebook is trying to repeat TikTok but that’s not the case. rather than making a twin of TikTok, Collab is more about music creation likewise as a video. Whether or not Facebook’s Collab is different from TikTok, both the apps fall within the same genre In comparison, TikTok, which remains one among the favourite platforms for video sharing, offers a large range of content to decide on from when creating a music video, and also has features like react and duet that serve an identical purpose. TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet company, already has over 2 billion downloads globally on the Apple App Store, and Google Play Store, in keeping with analytics platform Sensor Tower in blog post on April 29. Another TikTok-inspired video sharing app, Mitron has surpassed 50 lakh downloads on Play Store during a very short period. It is available on Play Store since April 2020. The app developer’s privacy policy page states that Mitron TV Private Limited may be a company registered in Bengaluru. The Mitron app includes a rating of 4.2 stars with over 3 lakh reviews, while TikTok include a rating of 4.4 stars with over 2 crore reviews, on the Play Store, as on 2 June 2020. TikTok faced a rating fiasco recently with its ratings on Play Store falling as low as 1.2, but moving up to 4.4 after Google’s intervention. Facebook said Collab is to be initially made available within the US and Canada. Users can sign on and begin using the app. Separately, Facebook also announced a replacement audio-calling app called Catchup that allows you to set up a call with up to eight persons. The app which comes from Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team.