Back in June this year, Facebook confirmed its plan for lip syncing video feature. Now a report from Techcrunch confirms that the company is working on a standalone app for teens where users can record and make lip syncing or dancing videos on popular songs. This app is expected to be called “Lasso”.
The members of Facebook’s video and Watch team is building this app under the leadership of Brady Voss.
Facebook’s new app will be competing against TikTok that was formerly known as Musically. Musically had over 60 million monthly users before it was merged in TikTok
Explore section of Instagram has mostly content created by TikTok app. People create videos on the app and share it on Instagram. Facebook’s popularity has dropped among teens and Facebook wants to get teens attention back. That is the reason Facebook is interested in building a TikTok rival.
Earlier this year, the company secured licensing deals with all the major record labels to let users use music in their videos. The company began experimenting with a Lip Sync Live feature for live streaming karaoke. Today, they opened it for Pages. The company also plans to let users pin their favorite songs to their profile, so their friends can listen to it.
Facebook made a team to look into Musical.ly’s popularity but the project was put on hold when they found that the app is not as popular as they expected. This project was resumed when Musical.ly merged into the TikTok app, which already had 500 million global monthly users in July 2018. Now Facebook has a reason to worry and it has started working on Lasso.
