Photo-sharing app Instagram will no longer only have vertical videos. The company has announced that its long-form video platform, IGTV, will now begin supporting landscape videos too. Till now, because of Instagram’s mobile-first strategy, IGTV only supported vertical videos. The company has said that it has now announced a change because of creator feedback and also because there some landscape videos present on IGTV already but users have to completely turn their smartphones to watch these in full screen.
The company announced the change in a blog post saying, “We realize this is an evolution from where IGTV started — we believe it’s the right change for viewers and creators. In many ways, opening IGTV to more than just vertical videos are similar to when we opened Instagram to more than just square photos in 2015. It enabled creativity to flourish and engagement to rise — and we believe the same will happen again with IGTV.”
Till now, IGTV has struggled to make a mark, especially if we compare its growth to TikTok. According to The Hollywood Reporter’s report that surfaced earlier this year, content creators are not too interested in IGTV. And it has since then been confirmed by other technology websites that creators love the features of the app, but they haven’t been able to monetize their content yet, and in a way, that defeats their purpose.
While YouTube has an ad placement service that pays creators, as of now, no brands are paying content creators to make long-form videos for IGTV. In addition to this, since IGTV only has support for vertical videos, content creators mostly cannot use the videos that they have created for YouTube on it. So it takes extra effort on their part to make a new video particularly for IGTV, a platform that has not been able to impress too many so far.
With vertical videos gone, these content creators will be encouraged to upload the same video that they create for YouTube on IGTV too. And since Instagram is the most popular social media platform as of now, and it has started showcasing IGTV videos in the main feed, we may see the video platform finally getting the boost that it needs because of this change in video format. However, Instagram did have to sacrifice the vertical video format for it, which was a key distinguishing factor of the IGTV platform.
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