You may soon be able to post one-hour videos to Instagram, so prepare for your directorial debut
In 2013, Instagram introduced video functionality after being a photo-only platform since its inception in 2010. At the time, Vine (RIP) was everything, and Instagram competed with the app by allowing users to upload videos that were 15 seconds long rather than Vine’s six-seconds clips. IG eventually increased the time to 60 seconds, and then added 15-second videos to Stories. And now, it seems like Insta might be making a huge jump time-wise: You may soon be able to post one-hour videos on Instagram. So, in other words, your feed could end up looking like a combination of photos and YouTube.
A new report in The Wall Street Journal says that the app is getting ready for an update that will include hour-long video uploads. This report hasn’t been confirmed and there are no details on how the feature would work, so take it with a grain of salt for now. If it happens, though, it would basically be like an extension of Instagram Stories, since WSJ says that the one-hour videos would be vertical.
Why would Instagram want to introduce super-long videos?
As Mashable points out, it would allow the company to make more money off of ads, since longer videos can allow for more ad space. At the moment, the only way to post long videos on Instagram is to do a livestream, and those don’t contain ads. As content creators get more adjusted to Instagram Live, these have been happening more and more — and it looks like Instagram wants to find a way to monetize that.
And in case you were wondering, yes, this is probably Instagram and Facebook competing with YouTube. YouTube recently took over as the most popular social network among U.S. teens, according to a Pew study — not Facebook, which had previously been in the top spot since 2015.
So far, it doesn’t seem like something every user would be into: false
32 person FaceTime, 1 hour long IG videos…. Talk about some unnecessary shit we didn’t ask for. Dawg, just put the IG posts back in chronological order like we’ve BEEN asking for @instagram
— Charles (GOOD Luck Chuck) (@cpenn4thewin) June 6, 2018
if instagram starts doing 1 hour videos i don’t know what i’ll even do with myself
— judith, the scourge diva (@dearjudence) June 6, 2018
Instagram hasn’t confirmed this update, and WSJ said, “The people said the plans are tentative and subject to change.” If it is real, we don’t know when it will come out. But it will certainly be interesting.
