Instagram announces its standalone long-form video hub, IGTV

There have been several talks about Instagram rolling out a separate platform for longer videos, in a head-on competition with YouTube and Snapchat Discover. Now, the wait is over for that as the social media giant has officially introduced the new standalone video hub, IGTV. The company announced the app yesterday at a press event, along with declaring that Instagram had hit one billion users.

While addressing the audience, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom stated, “It’s time for video to move forward, and evolve.” As such, “IGTV is for watching long-form videos from your favorite creators.”

With IGTV, the viewers would be able to watch hour-long videos from different content creators they would be following. Speaking of which, the followed accounts on Instagram would automatically get followed on the new service. Moreover, the users would have various sections to browse like ‘For You,’ ‘Following,’ ‘Popular’ and ‘Continue Watching.’

That said, the users would also have the option to become a ‘channel’ itself, by uploading their own video content. Initially, the new and small accounts would only be allowed to post up to 10 minutes long video, no in the case of large accounts in terms of followers mainly as they would be able to upload hour-long content. However, as per the company, the end goal would be to allow every user on the platform to share videos of unlimited lengths.

Also that, the video service won’t contain any ads for the time being, but Systrom highlighted the notion that advertisement would be “a very reasonable place for them to end up.”

In order to get started, there would already be some top channels up and be running, including Kim Kardashian West, Kevin Hart, Lele Pons, Manny Gutierrez, Selena Gomez, Ninja, Katie Austin and some more.

There will be a separate application for IGTV, but the users would also be able to access it from inside the Instagram app via its dedicated button next to DM.

The app is currently available on Play Store in some regions. For the full release on both Android and iOS, Instagram says, “IGTV will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks on Android and iOS.”