TikTok Short Videos, Blow Up Big Shows

Photo+credit%3A+commons.wikimedia.org

Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

David Reynaga, OwlFeed Lifestyle Reporter

Mobile devices are the key and also the main important thing in a teenagers life that has multiple values to it. One of the values leading to TikTok, an app meant to watch short videos and to find your interest within those videos. TikTok has changed that algorithm however from a trend going around the internet, and it all starts with one Tiktok. Have you ever opened up TikTok or kept scrolling through the For You page to find a tv show clip? If you have then that is what the trend is, you grab a short clip of that tv show and you add it to a Tiktok. The scale of the video is different from the short clip, so in order to fit it perfectly, you must apparently add crappy mobile gameplay. 

This mostly all started with the show Family Guy, an animated sitcom that was made on January 31, 1999. Around 3 or 4 or more months ago, TikTok users started to create Family Guy videos, however, it was in a different format to watching Family Guy. You don’t get the full episodes, but rather a clip from Family Guy, with crap mobile gameplay at the bottom. This made users like it, mostly because the gameplay is so ignorable, that the clip is the only thing that matters. Now with the TikTok algorithm, since you liked that clip, you would eventually get more and more, just ending up being a continuous loop. Most of the time, when watching the clip it will get users to want to continue watching it or see the whole thing to understand it in more context. Now that you are done watching the Family Guy clip, you possibly go on Hulu and start to watch Family Guy just from that one Clip. This basically proved that TikTok saved Family Guy, since according to Google Trends, on December 25-31st 2022, it became the most interesting over the past 12 months.

Photo credit: flickr.com

This will most likely be a common theme, since now in 2023 Family Guy has started to lose its value because users are making something new. This would make sense since there are a billion users and around a thousand of those users can make the same clips. TikTok users now have decided to tackle another animated Sitcom in 2023, and it is the most inappropriate one, which is South Park. With TikTok guidelines, this adds more limits to South Park clips, since around %80 of the show is quite offensive. With the guidelines and the number of posts in South Park, there is still no decrease in South Park or a show that has overcome South Park in the Tiktok algorithm. Now it is understandable that a user would try to find the aftermath of the clip after the clip ended in the user’s post, but sadly that isn’t the case. TikTok users leave a lot of junk on the edge of their seats and don’t post part 2’s or the aftermath, even though now Tiktok now makes 3-minute videos to 10 minutes. Now, this of course is like Family Guy, you can’t find the aftermath of the clip in the post, so you switch to Hulu and you watch South Park there. 

There are of course other random shows that have gotten the clip trend, but none of them got a lot of attention, to make everyone do it. There have been Spongebob clips from time to time, but none of them make it even far. There are movie ones too, where at most, it’s a movie that no one has seen or heard of, but sometimes they do make it obvious which movie it is.