News Bytes and Blogs _

Last spring, Disney unveiled its Disney+ OTT service, claiming victory over Apple with a presentation that succeeded in all ways that of Apple’s for Apple TV+. Seven months in, Disney has established itself as an essential platform for anyone who is a fan of the brands, of which includes Marvel and Star Wars. Disney+ also raised the bar of people’s expectations from a streaming service with the killer feature, The Mandalorian, a hefty library of Disney series and movies and a very user-friendly interface.

Instagram testing out ‘Reels’ similar to TikTok

Originally known as Clips, and it goes by Cenas in Brazil where it is first being tested. Instagram Reels lets you make 15-second video clips set to music and share them as Stories, with the potential to go viral on a new Top Reels section of Explore. Instagram will have to fight big to compete with its massive competitor, TikTok that has rich features and a community of 1.5 billion monthly users. Instead of starting from scratch like Facebook’s Lasso, Instagram has the advantage of being able to cross-promote Reels heavily to its own billion users.

Google now has Local Stores Option in its Local & Shopping Campaigns

Google’s new ad feature helps local stores to cash in on holiday shopping as well. Come Xmas season, the search for local stores continues to surge with it peaking about 350 times in searches for “local” + “near me” than 10 years ago. When people visit a neighborhood park, museum, local store, or restaurant, Google Maps connects them with the places they’re interested in since people tap on location pins in Maps hundreds of millions of times per week. By featuring your locations, people can add you as a convenient stop along their route to grab lunch, stop in for shopping, and more.

Facebook Pay to Unify Payments Across Platforms.
Facebook has formally announced Facebook Pay, a unified service for payments across its family of apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. It supports major credit, debit cards and PayPal, and transactions are processed by partners like Stripe. Facebook Pay uses traditional financial channels and is different from its Libra cryptocurrency project, which has not taken of due to regulatory resistance across the globe

Instagram will likely remove “Like” counts

Instagram will start removing “Like” counts for U.S. users soon. Instagram will hide “Like” counts from public posts in the Feed, on the desktop platform and in profiles. And only the account owner will be able to view the number of likes on a post. This announcement comes as a disruption to the influencer marketing that Instagram is famous for. The change is likely to shake up the influencer market and the ways brands measure success.