August: TikTok publishing, Twitch sign-in, and a picker that reads the whole stream

August was the busiest month Reelium has had, and almost none of it was announced while it happened. The changelog now has every entry; this is the shape of it, and the honest state of the two things that are still not finished.

You can publish to TikTok

TikTok approved our Content Posting API application on 28 August. That was the last gate. A clip scheduled to TikTok now posts to your feed, and TikTok appears beside YouTube Shorts everywhere Reelium asks where a clip should go — including "Post it now" on the clips page. If you connected TikTok before this and wondered why the destination never appeared, that was the review, and it is over.

Instagram is not there yet. Publishing has moved onto Instagram Login — the API path that actually supports posting on your behalf — and that submission is sitting in Meta's review queue. Until it clears, connecting Instagram may fail at the consent screen. The connect card now says so instead of handing you a raw error, and we will email you when it is approved. We are not putting a date on it, because the date is not ours to give.

Two smaller publishing fixes worth knowing: clips over 64MB were being sent to TikTok as a single chunk, above TikTok's own per-chunk ceiling, so they failed — that is fixed. And every Reel and TikTok used to go out with frame zero as the cover, which on a vertical clip is usually a blur of motion. Reelium now stores a cover per clip, chosen from that clip's own peak, and sends it with the post.

The picker reads the whole stream before it chooses

This is the change I would defend hardest. Clip selection used to work forward through a source and commit as it went, which quietly meant the first hour of a six-hour VOD got the benefit of the doubt and hour five never competed. It now nominates candidates across the entire stream and ranks them against each other. A moment three hours in is judged on the same terms as the opening.

Alongside that: the number of clips scales with how long the stream was, instead of every source being asked for the same count, and that number is a ceiling rather than a quota — Reelium will not pad the list with weak moments to hit it. Each pick now shows the evidence behind it rather than a model-written justification: the reaction in chat, the transcript line that earned it, and how big that reaction was against the rest of the night. When you disagree with a pick, you can now see exactly why it was made, which is the only version of this that is worth anything.

And there is Find a Moment. If you remember something the picker missed, describe it — "the bit where chat lost it at the jumpscare" — and Reelium re-searches the stream you already analysed and hands back the matching moments as new picks. It does not re-analyse, so it does not spend your hours again.

Pricing is metered in hours now

The old model charged per stream, which punished you for clipping a 40-minute stream and undercharged for an eight-hour one. Plans are now denominated in hours of stream analysed per month: Free 4, Creator 14, Pro 28, Power 56. There is no cap on how many VODs you run on a paid plan and no per-clip credits — every clip the picker finds is included, as it always was. Each tier also raises how long a single source can be, at 4, 5, 6 and 8 hours, so a subathon fits on Power. There is a longer note on the reasoning in the pricing post.

The parts of the workflow that were annoying

• Your logo on your clips. Upload a logo and set your handle under Settings → Look and Reelium paints them onto every render, with control over corner, size and opacity. Pro and Power.
• Fonts you can see. The font picker listed typefaces by name, in one interface font, which made choosing one a guess. Every tile now paints its own name in its own typeface.
• One publish panel. Publishing behaved differently depending on whether you came from the clip page or the wizard. Same panel now, both places.
• Schedule rows that say something. Each scheduled post links to its clip, names the platform, shows the render state, and states the time in your timezone rather than UTC.
• Deleting clips whose source is gone. Twitch and Kick expire VODs, which used to leave clips stranded against a source that no longer existed. You can delete them, and the dead streams too.
• Captions on Free. The Free plan advertises the caption editor and free users could not reach it. Fixed. Word-by-word karaoke captions are on every plan; what paid plans add is the style library.
• Analysis starts when your stream ends, rather than up to an hour later on a fixed schedule.
• A human at the end of the help bot. It can now hand you to a person instead of dead-ending, and the reply comes back to you in the app.

Account, security and the boring kind of trust

You can now sign in with Twitch, which connects your channel as a clip source in the same consent — one screen rather than signing up and then hunting for a connect button. Accounts are matched on your Twitch user ID and never on your email address, deliberately: Twitch will not tell us whether an address is verified, and matching on one would be a way to take over somebody's account.

There is a password reset flow from the login page, and changing a password while signed in now asks for your current one first. The access tokens behind your platform connections are encrypted at rest rather than stored as readable text. Session replays — which we record to work out what went wrong for real users — have all their text masked, and the privacy policy names both PostHog and Sentry as sub-processors.

A large accessibility pass also landed: "Skip to content" genuinely skips the navigation on the pages where it did not, icon-only buttons have names a screen reader can announce, dialogs trap focus and return it where it came from, and low-contrast grey text was raised to meet WCAG AA across the marketing pages, the calculators and the help bot.

Two things I want to be straight about

Onboarding used to open on a pricing table, which is a strange thing to show someone who has not seen the product work yet. It does not any more — you land in the product, and pasting a stream URL on the homepage now carries you straight into that analysis and skips onboarding entirely.

And the Pulse view counter was crediting views on clips that were no longer publicly reachable. That is fixed, which means your Pulse number may read lower this week than last. The lower number is the correct one. I would rather tell you that than let a metric quietly flatter us.

As ever: if it breaks, reply to the welcome email. It lands in my inbox.

— Max