Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you need to rewatch a long TikTok video because you missed some parts of it? Same!

Well good news, fellow TikTok watchers! The platform has added a new “scrubbing” feature to its video. 

According to The Verge, “TikTok is now rolling out the ability for everyone to publish videos up to three minutes in length, three times the existing one-minute limit. The extension is meant to give creators more flexibility while filming and limit the need for multi-part posts — though I suspect creators love hooking users that way and will keep breaking up stories.”

So what does the “scrubbing” feature have to do with longer videos?

Okay, say you’re in the same situation we just mentioned. You’re watching a 3-minute long video. Instead of having to re-watch the whole thing, TikTok’s scrubbing update can allow you to move forward and reverse on any video you’re watching by using a white line or progress bar at the bottom.

Here’s how to navigate through TikTok’s fast-forward and reverse scrubbing control on the app:

1. Touch the thin line or progress bar at the bottom of the video to reveal a thicker timeline.
2. Drag the dot in the timeline forward to use the fast-forward and backward to reverse control.
3. The dot on the timeline is an indicator of how far you are in the video.

I’ve found out that in certain cases, the dot on the white line doesn’t automatically appear until you watch a video longer than sixty seconds before the line fills up or becomes thicker as the video progresses.

Here’s the tricky part: the scrubbing feature may be unavailable to certain users. It might also not appear on certain longer videos and some shorter ones. It is also inaccessible in TikTok’s web version.

Overall, I’m thrilled to see new features that can make the user experience on the platform smoother and more convenient! I can’t wait to see how this will impact people’s behaviour on the platform – whether as creators or enjoyers-of-content – as well as how it will impact insights, and thus content creation as a whole.