Instagram has rolled out a new app for longer videos: IGTV. It’s now available for iOS and Android.
If you already have an Instagram account, you can log in with your username and even add other accounts you might have. Profiles you follow will be in your feed along with some “popular” content. I had videos from the ABC network and celebrity dogs in my feed when I first logged in. Here are some tips on how to get started on IGTV and my first impressions of the app.
The game changer.
Here’s the major thing that’s going to make this different. The video feed is vertical. So you’re not going to be able to just reupload your videos from YouTube or Facebook. You can, but they are gonna get cropped!
Using the app.
The app is pretty simple to use. Swipe right to see videos in your feed. Swipe up to search or browse. You can heart, comment and share, just like on Instagram. You can copy a link to share the video and chose to share to Facebook. (Check out my dog, Penny! Embeds don’t seem to be working yet for WordPress.) If you have a business account, you can view insights, which include views, likes, comments and average percentage watched.
I also noticed a new little icon in Instagram that takes me right to IGTV, and there’s a new IGTV tab if you’re using the desktop website.
Click on your profile pic to upload video. You can add a title, a description and hashtags. The app auto generates a thumbnail and you can either chose a different one from the video or upload your own. I’m going to guess keywords and hashtags will be important in getting your videos discovered.
No camera.
There is no camera function in the app. So you need to film on your phone or maybe turn your DSLR or point & shoot camera sideways. (Is that a thing?) You can do some editing on your phone, and I’m sure the same hacks for editing square videos on computers will also work with the vertical dimensions.
I was able to upload videos between 15 seconds to 10 minutes. I have about 7,000 followers. Bigger accounts will be able to upload videos up to a hour.
If you upload a horizontal video, the app will crop. It doesn’t look terrible if you have a single focus in your video – like my Chewbacca video.
There are no commercials, ads or monetization, yet, but branded accounts were definitely featured in my feed. According to TechCrunch, channels and monetization are planned.
First impressions.
It’s a little to early too to tell if this app is going to last. It doesn’t have any of the fun features of Instagram – filters, live video, stickers and stories.
I had a lot of lag time trying to upload videos and then when I checked back later, I had a fuzzy screen. This might look weird to the kids who didn’t grow up with TV antennas.
I’m not a fan of editing video on my phone. Some video programs let you change the aspect ratio. Social media types have been editing square videos for socials, so we might need to learn to adjust to vertical video.
The interface is a little simple, but easy to use, and having a connection to the Instagram app might get videos some traffic.
From what I’ve been reading, Instagram wants this app to be for the everyday users, like YouTube used to be. So it will be interesting to see who uses it and what kind of content get shared. I think we’ll see a lot of short clips and reposts of Instagram stories and Snaps for now.
I’m interested in seeing what kind of creative things people will make in a vertical format. As a video creator, monetization is appreciated, but it might be nice to have a place where people can create and share for fun.
