For the past few years, people had been wondering which online service will be the Instagram of video, seeing how Instagram upended the photo sharing landscape and made it its own at the expense of Facebook and Flickr which had been the more popular services prior to Instagram’s debut. With last night’s announcement, that may well be Instagram itself. Instagram last night announced the addition of video into its mobile applications. With the Android and iOS app updates released today, it now lets people record and post 15 second videos on which they can also add fancy filters just like with its photos.
Mobile video apps such as SocialCam, Viddy, and Telly, have yet to set the world on fire, then again they don’t have the hundred million user-base that Instagram already has or the features that Instagram has decided to apply to its video recorder. Vine on the other hand, is the talk of town due to creative minds taking advantage of its six second limitation and looping nature.
Instagram stuck fast to its photography roots since it was launched in November 2010 until last night. In an interview with TechCrunch in 2011 CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom said, “Video makes sense to do. I will say it’s a very interesting area. We really want to go after something bigger than filtered photos. Our job and our vision is to allow you to tell the story of your life, and whatever tools that may be for video, we’ll end up making them. I’m not sure if that includes filters for video or not, but we’ll definitely consider it”.
Consider it he did. And with 13 filters too. Instagram didn’t go into video just because Twitter’s video app, Vine, shot to popularity within weeks of its launch earlier this year. This is something that Systrom and his team had wanted to do for quite some time but couldn’t, due to the limited resources that his company had. On the other hand, Facebook must have been itching to get its hand on mobile video and it must have hurt them to see Twitter’s Vine soaring.
By including video capabilities within the Instagram application, the company has a ready-made 130 million accounts to jump start its videos. Unlike Twitter’s separate Vine app, Instagram users don’t need to switch out to a different app to shoot their videos as everything remains within the familiar Instagram playground.
Asked why the videos are capped at 15 seconds each, Systrom said at the event that it was an “artistic choice”, never mind the fact that 15 seconds is about the length of a short television or Internet video advertisement. People in the advertising industry must be delighted at the prospect.
Vine’s six second limit may be too limiting for many but given the variety of creative videos that have been published through the service, it actually unleashed a whole new category of videographers. One only needs to look at the accounts of Pinot Ichwandardi, Will Sasso, Chris D’Elia, Meagan Cignoli, Khoa Phan, or even Twitter’s own Ian Padgham on Vine to see how people have taken advantage of Vine’s characteristics.
Instagram’s 15 seconds will most likely yield a different kind of videos from Vine. The extra nine seconds can both be liberating and a nightmare to deal with, depending on what kind of videos you intend to record. A six second limit puts Vine into a category of specialized videos and creators. Instagram’s 15 second limit for videos allow for so much more content packed into a single video.
What’s clear out of this is that brands will definitely love Instagram a lot more than they may already have. While Instagram photos may have been great for consumers who want to share their moments, videos will mean a great deal more to brands especially as Instagram will undoubtedly roll out in-stream advertising and promoted posts in the future.
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