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Bike, camera, action: Strava adds video uploads to activities

Bike, camera, action: Strava adds video uploads to activities

Strava’s long streak of updates – which saw the addition of an off-road specific interface just last week – has continued. As of today, the exercise platform has begun to roll out video, appearing in feeds alongside pictures and maps. 

Multiple clips of up to 30 seconds can be added to activities, with the process working in the same way as when a user adds photos, and supporting both landscape or portrait modes. If a video runs longer than 30 seconds, it’ll automatically get trimmed to length (from the start, it seems).

From an outsider perspective, it seems like a pretty nice addition to the app. On one hand, a video can offer inspiration in a way a map may not, and there could also be benefits for route planning – seeing how rocky or exposed a route is, or how much traffic there is.

On the flipside, it’s surely just a matter of time before outdoor content creators and influencers get in on the act – which could be fun for grabby TikTok-esque entertainment, or could be a portal to the infiltration of branded content. We shall see.    

Strava says the roll-out will take a few weeks before the feature reaches all Strava’s millions of users, and it’s available for all athletes – not just paid members. It’s early days so not everyone in your feed will have it yet, but if you’d like to get an idea of how it looks in action, here’s Phil Gaimon’s Strava video debut.

Video is the headline feature of this latest swathe of updates, but there are a couple of more modest arrivals that are quite useful. 

For starters, there’s now the ability to embed activities on the web version of the app – which hasn’t been possible before, and is why if you’ve been reading articles about Strava on CyclingTips in the past, a static screenshot of an activity is about as exciting as the visuals have gotten.

Now, to embed you just click ‘Get embed code’ in the upper right hand corner of the activity. Here, take a look at Alexander Kristoff’s ‘Lunch Ride’ (stage four of the Tour de Suisse):

You can now tag other Strava users (@ insert_your_bicycle_friend’s_name_here) in activity descriptions, which you couldn’t do before. 

And then, of course, there’s the trail sports update that my colleague Ronan wrote about recently, which incorporates 3D mapping, places of interest, and many of the other recent additions to the Strava platform.

With a fast-growing global community of millions of athletes to keep engaged, the activity-tracking giant isn’t sitting around.

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