The leaked Instagram long-form video hub has been confirmed to be launching soon as IGTV, which will be accessible from the Explore tab, and will allow users post longer-formed video of ten minute length and above.
Instagram has been wooing online content creators to the new platform to create videos that are at least 10-minute long, instead of the 1-minute maximum videos allowed currently on the app.
While the photo-cum-video sharing service has witnessed exponential growth in the past few years, it's still grappling with discovering the turnkey feature that will permanently sway users to its side against the fierce competition from Snapchat.
Albeit, the growth projection puts Instagram as adding 100 million users every four months, and with the recent announcement of 800 million in September 2017, Instagram may be hitting 1 billion monthly users this second quarter.
The IGTV videos will be similar to what's available in YouTube rather than a direct competion to the likes of Netflix, and will offer a link-out option for creators to drive traffic to their other web properties. It will be full-screen with a resolution of up to 4K, and users will be presented with a collection of recent videos, popular titles and the ability to continue watching clips from where they stopped.
Instagram may also be adding a direct monetization avenue for the creators, which perhaps will include revenue sharing, though no official confirmation about the possibility.
The overriding idea is to enable these creators express their style of content and also leverage their already sizeable audience on the platform, to expand the IGTV footprint on mobile platforms rather than the more regular publishers and TV studios.
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