When Snap Inc. announced its Q2 financial results earlier this month, it reported 173 million daily active users – an increase of 21% year-over-year. But this fell short of what was expected. Analysts were expecting 175.2 million DAUs. 

(Snap defines a DAU as anyone who opens the Snapchat app during a defined 24 hour period.)

Regardless of your position on this stock, one thing is clear about the company: they are very creative and they continue to innovate.

The company is currently testing a new feature called “Crowd Surf.” What it does is automatically stitch together related Snapchat Stories from the same location to form seamless videos. 

It made its debut at a concert in San Francisco. The real magic is how Crowd Surf was able to assemble a continuous audio track using an assortment of 10-second Snapchat Stories, all taken from different locations at the concert and all from different users.

Click here and scroll down for a preview video.

To accomplish all of this, Snap takes a “sound print” of the audio playing in a particular location from people’s Stories. It then filters each of the clips so they sound more alike and autogenerates a stitched together video.

You obviously need a critical mass of users and content for this to work, which is why the feature was introduced at a concert. But it’s certainly a remarkable way of creating valuable content from decentralized user inputs.

I guess the only question is: How long until Instagram copies this?

Photo by Yvette de Wit on Unsplash