Instagram takes on YouTube with IGTV.
What's going on. I'm Rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily.
Forget everything you know about mobile video because Instagram has a new way to watch. It ditches the current norm of YouTube and even your TV set with one big difference. The video is meant to be watched in a vertical format. Yes, something we've been saying for years in the professional video world that's not acceptable is now totally acceptable.
Long form vertical video from the creators that you love. It's mobile first, it's simple, and its quality. That's IGTV.
That's Instagram founder Kevin Sistrom on stage at the announcement in San Francisco. Instagram launched just eight short years ago, back in twenty ten, and the growth has been phenomenal since then. The app says it now has get this one billion monthly active users. Until now, Instagram has been great for sharing photos and stories that people love, including myself, and even short video clips.
But the company sees a much.
Bigger opportunity now to capitalize on younger users who are not watching as much traditional TV, but they are watching more and more videos from creators online.
An entirely new category of video now exists, and it's being made by creators. Teens might be watching less TV, but they're watching more creators online and the number of creators has grown exponentially.
Instagram says the problem with the current state of mobile video is that it hasn't adapted to the way we watch on our phones today.
We still watch videos formatted for a TV on a vertical screen, which means we either have to rotate our phone awkwardly or watch a tiny little version. And that doesn't make much sense, does it?
Then they took a direct aim at YouTube.
Video on mobile is also clunky and unnatural. Current apps make you search or browse the directory to find things you like, when was the last time you had to turn on a TV and then had to type a search just to start watching.
When you load Instagram TV, it just starts playing kind of like old school TV. And I get that they even use static on the screen when you switch channels or wait for a video to load, something that teens don't even identify with because they never lived in an analog world, so they don't remember that on their real TV screens like I do.
But here's the thing.
What we love about YouTube and online video is that we can find exactly what we want to watch, and the idea of turning on IGTV and sitting back and trusting it to pick the stuff that we want to see might not work. Right now, there are various feeds you can watch, including a custom for you feed which includes videos from Instagram.
People that you follow.
Then there are popular videos and a section called continue watching, which lets you pick up.
Where you left off. There's also a.
Search function, but it's currently limited to searching for accounts. So I typed in one plus six the name of a hot new smartphone to see if there are any reviews of the smartphone on Instagram TV, something that I might do on YouTube, and I came up empty handed.
That's not good.
A search for Hollywood brings up accounts with Hollywood in the name, but not videos about the place. Right now, you can access igtv in two ways inside the Instagram app by tapping the little TV icon in the upper right hand corner, or you can download a standalone IGTV app. The difference is that the standalone app lets you skip your typical Instagram feed and the videos just start playing when you open it up.
So will igtv take over YouTube? Well? Probably not.
There will always be a place for videos that you can search through and watch on different places like your TV screen, your tablet, and your phone. But igtv is definitely interesting in how it embraces vertical video, and it could be an easy way for Instagram creators, many who are already really popular on that platform, to reach their followers in yet another way, and one that does not require their users to change platforms or open.
Up a different app. As for me, of course, I'm going to try it out.
I'll experiment with some vertical videos, even though it goes against everything I was taught in journalism school, but I'll see what igtv and all the buzz is about.
And thank you for listening. I'm Rich Demiro. I'll talk to you real soon.
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