Instagram launched what some are calling a direct competitor to YouTube, IGTV.
First, I’ll start by listing some reasons I think this is the perfect time for Instagram to have launched this product.
- Smartphones are just beginning to get real horsepower and amazing battery life to enable this kind of experience and the amount of time people will want to watch longform video on their phones.
- Portrait video is no longer thought about as terrible. Even by pros.
- YouTube hasn’t innovated nearly enough with video formats. They’ve supported 180, 360, VR, etc. but haven’t messed much with things that work best on mobile phones like portrait video when maybe they should have been.
- “Content creators” now have powerful mobile tool sets even more than they did before.
- Instagram has 1B monthly active users. Content creators cannot dismiss this platform flippantly.
Second, I’ll list why I don’t think this will kill YouTube – but why it might move some of the content creators onto this platform.
- Portrait video is intimate. So for things like “talking head” videos, make-up tips, and sharing an adventure, or vlogging it may even be better than YouTube for these things. For this reason, a lot of this type of content may move from YouTube to IGTV.
- That being said, YouTube doesn’t make their bread and butter on these videos – nor even on vloggers. Though these internet celebrities suck up a lot of the oxygen around YouTube news (meaning, they get headlines)… by far YouTube is the video search engine. No time soon will you be fixing your toilets plumbing with a video from IGTV. YouTube’s business won’t be hurt much at all by losing vloggers or “Vine-like” funny videos to IGTV. In fact, it may help with issues like Logan Paul.
- Tablet and TV — YouTube is saturated into the market of available devices. They are built into TVs, TV-connected devices like Alexa (I think?), Apple TV, Roku, etc. They also work on iPad. IGTV will never be on iPad and may not ever be on TVs. This is a smartphone medium.
- Search Index – If you do a Google search for “Jeff Bezos interview” or “New Tesla commercial” or “Star Wars movie trailer” or “How Air Conditioning works” you will land on YouTube. And that will be that way for years to come.
Third, here are my general thoughts on the app experience:
- Coming from Instagram Stories some of the gestures are odd. But I think I’ll get used to them.
- I wish there was a quick way to pause or mute a video but it seems at least 2, if not 3, taps away from anywhere.
- Discover-ability will need to improve. At current, you can only see the thumbnails for 4 popular videos at a time. Compare to Instagram’s Explore area, where you can quickly see dozens.
- It eats battery. But, as I said above, I think the timing is right. Phones are going to greatly improve CPU which will help battery life.
Overall, I think IGTV is a great app and a good move for Instagram to make. I’m also happy that it is a separate app. While I believe that “creation apps” like Boomerang and Hyperlapse could have been strictly within Instagram’s main app – I believe consumption apps like IGTV belong outside of it.
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Tags: dan-kimbrough,igtv,instagram,video,youtube