Snapchat surreptitiously launched their web player last night while the rest of us were glued to our TV sets last night, waiting to see Leonardo DiCaprio accept his long overdue ‘Best Actor’ award. The new Snapchat web player was rolled out for desktop to enable users at home to view Snapchat’s ‘Snap Stories’ from the computer. This marks a pretty monumental moment for Snapchat, because until now users have only been able to access Snapchat content by using the app.
This move by Snapchat comes on the heels of the company creating profile URLs just a few months ago, a move that made it easier for people to follow each other on Snapchat simply by click the URL and following the prompts to open the app.
As of right now the web player is only being used for Snapchat’s story from The Oscars, which is basically a feed of reporters that were on the red carpet last night. It is safe to assume though that this functionality will be getting rolled out for a lot more events going forward, and I expect to see it available for individual Snap Stories within the next few months (that’s my hunch). You can see Snapchat’s first ever web story by clicking here.
Something of note here is that Snapchat’s long been a huge advocate of shooting all video in portrait mode, ignoring the favorable landscape mode that works much better on desktop. As you can see from the still below their web player is obviously in portrait mode, something that almost seems out of place in today’s Internet:
One thing of note is that Snapchat chose to roll out their brand new web player for The Oscars, instead of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival Presented By Amstel Light, which was the nation’s other big event this weekend. Just a heads up on that, I was down in South Beach and scored some awesome interviews, most notably with Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods. I’m shooting to have that up later for you bros so definitely stay tuned for that.
Over on Business Insider there’s a little chatter about what the end game might be with Snapchat’s all new ‘Snapchat Live’ web player:
https://twitter.com/VivekxK/status/704190842148225025
Again, you can see the all new Snapchat web player by clicking here.
[h/t Business Insider]