The moment Instagram was rumored to begin including support for videos, everybody knew Vine was in serious trouble. Then when Instagram actually announced it, boasting 15-second videos with clip erasing and filters, people basically just declared Vine dead. With today’s update, it’s clear Vine isn’t going down without a fight.
Starting within the camera itself, Vine includes new tools for shooting your clips. Yes, they are still limited to 6 seconds, but now you have an optional grid, focus tool, and ghost tool to help perfect your shots.
Once you film something, you can now choose to add your video to one of 15 channels like comedy or music to categorize it and perhaps gain more views and likes. The channels are accessible under the Explore tab for browsing. Also under the Explore tab is the new On The Rise section to discover new users who are quickly gaining popularity on Vine.
Revining is an interesting concept that brings the familiar “retweet” and “reblog” functions to Vine, allowing you to repost a clip you see in your feed to your followers. Speaking of followers, you can now choose whether you’d like to approve new followers or not, essentially enabling private Vines for the first time.
The Vine update is pretty competitive with Instagram. While it doesn’t tackle clip erasing, video length, or filters, it does add some unique features of its own that Instagram doesn’t have like ghosting, channels, and revining. Maybe Vine isn’t dead after all.
The update is available immediately on iOS. Private Vines are available in a Google Play update later today and the other new features are coming separately for Android next week.
[via Vine]