Instagram launches IGTV, a vertical video platform that is aiming at Youtube

Aurel Dragan 21/06/2018 | 15:10

Instagram has grown to be five times the size of Snapchat and now is coming after Youtube. The company bought by Facebook in 2012 announced that it will launch a new app called IGTV that will host videos up to one hour.

At the launch event in San Francisco, co-founder Kevin Systrom said that Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly active users. The new app is already available as a tab on Instagram, but it can also be downloaded separately.

The opening of a longer videos was expected from quite a long time from Instagram. New is the form of the videos, that is vertical, not horizontal, on the smartphone. The regular video will be up to ten minutes, a lot more than the previous one minute limit for videos on Instagram, but the video can go up to one hour for creators with massive audience. IGTV videos will be prerecorded, not live, but live video is something that the company will be looking at in the future.

The targeted public is the one that Instagram already has, but it hopes to attract teenagers. 40 percent of them are not watching TV anymore, but they are still watching videos formatted for TV on a vertical screen of a smartphone. Meanwhile, Youtube is the undefeated king of videos watched both on computer screens and on smartphones and it will not be easy for IGTV to find its way in the world dominated by Google’s app. Youtube has just announced that it has more than 1.9 billion monthly users.

IGTV is presented as a place to watch entertainment, not share life updates with friends. There will also be ways for creators to make money by special designed tools.

So far, the biggest difference between IGTV and Youtube will be the vertical view, which may be a good idea, but it will also limit the viewers at the phone screen because it is not easy to watch vertical format videos on wide screens.