So you want to see a short clip of how an epic NFL touchdown has been pulled through, but there are only a few clips on YouTube that are short and have a different perspective. You turn to Vine, and found a relatively the same number of clips. And all you find is a single focus on the star player.
You need other sources with an entirely different angle and highlight the other players, almost as if you were in the actual place of the event watching the game.
Snapchat wants to do just that for you with the newly launched Story Explorer, a new Snapchat feature that is intended to help you view various angles of an important event, not just NFL, but any happening or current affairs that matter.
That is because Snapchat believes users may not be satisfied with just one vantage point of an event, so more than two perspectives at a moment could help to satiate their desire to have as much as possible every unique angle of an event. This can be achieved, however, only when enough number of users are at the same place taking video recordings of what’s happening around them and sharing the clip via the messaging app.
Luckily for Snapchat users, the app has recorded at least 100 million daily active users and six billion video views per day as of November 2015. What this means is that Snapchat users can expect to be able to view thousands of short clips of a particular event. There are billions of what is called “snaps” – because the videos are short – submitted to Snapchat servers every day.
The goal of Story Explorer is provide a depth of stories for Snapchat users who are looking for video clips. Snapchat will work to collect what it deems to be the most interesting recorded clips of an event and highlight in a Live Story. Users who still want to view more videos can continue to stream clips by swiping up on the display, after which the Story Explorer will turn up some 10 snaps of the same event.
In the long run, what Snapchat wants to achieve is geared toward innovation, or disrupting the mobile video sector with this creative feature. And it stands pretty well compared to competitors such as YouTube and Vine, which lack the depth that users are looking for.
The addition of Story Explorer to Snapchat features is a testament to an increasingly vibrant mobile video market.
