YouTube Shorts can now be 3 minutes long

Image: YouTube

YouTube Shorts is rolling out some new features, including longer videos. The company's answer to TikTok can soon be up to three minutes long, which it said was a highly requested feature by users. Creators will get access to longer Shorts starting October 15.

Aside from extending the length of Shorts, YouTube introduced a template feature that allows you to match your clips to trending sounds taken from other videos.

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TikTok Accelerator Program for Indigenous Creators Returns

The TikTok Accelerator for Indigenous Creators, presented by the National Screen Institute, is back for its fourth year.

 Applications for this year's program are officially open today and the platform has announced a 650% expansion, growing participation from 40 to 300 Indigenous creators! The program is free and open to SMBs and creators who self-identify as First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The deadline to apply is Friday, October 18, 2024 at 11:59pm Central Time on the National Screen Institute's website.

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Spotify Offline Backup lets Premium users listen to songs offline even without downloads

Image: Spotify

If you're a Spotify Premium user and forgot to download your favourite playlist or you're looking to save on data or phone storage, Spotify is giving you the option to listen offline sans downloads with the new Offline Backup feature. It takes your recently streamed and queued tracks and compiles these songs into a playlist. It includes tracks stored on your device as part of your regular listening sessions (a.k.a. cache).

Spotify lets you filter and sort songs if you're looking for a "certain vibe." You can arrange it by artist, mood, and genre. Like its other playlists, Offline Backup evolves as you listen, so there's always something new there.

Offline Backup will appear automatically in the Home feed when you're offline. You just need to listen to more than five songs recently and have offline listening enabled. You can find this feature under Settings > Data Saving and Offline > Offline Listening / Offline Access. You can add this playlist to Your Library for easier access.

Offline Backup is rolling out globally, so you should have it once you've updated your app to the latest version. It comes to Android and iOS, including Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

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Samsung Galaxy S24 FE is a midrange phone with Galaxy AI

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Samsung is bringing its Galaxy AI features to more users with the launch of its newest FE device. The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE shares many similarities with its predecessor—the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE—and the base models in the series—the Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus.

It'll be the first FE device to get the same advanced Galaxy AI experience as the rest of the Galaxy S24 series. It supports Circle to Search with Google, Interpreter feature, Live Translate, Chat Assist, Browsing Assist, and Note Assist.  

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