Details regarding the upcoming long-form video service of the social media platform Instagram have been released. The existence of the upcoming video service was first reported a few days ago, and it is expected to compete with the popular video streaming platform YouTube. The social media platform is currently talking to a number of social media stars and content creators in preparation for the launch of the video service, which is expected to take place on June 20th. The report also states that content creators will soon be able to upload vertically-oriented video clips with resolutions of up to 4K to the video streaming service. Moreover, these video clips can also be considerably longer than the 60-second videos that Instagram currently allows. In addition, the report claims that the videos that will be uploaded on Instagram’s long-form video service will have a quality that is comparable to videos posted by popular content creators on YouTube. Instagram users will be able access the video clips from a centralized location that will also curate popular videos.
Like YouTube, the long-form video service of Instagram will also monetize the videos that content creators upload on the platform. Even though it is not yet clear how Instagram will monetize the content, it is likely that it will play pre-roll or mid-video advertisements. A percentage of the ad revenue will then be shared with the content creator. The service will also allow content creators to include links to their social media accounts, websites, and e-commerce stores, and users can access these links by swiping up while watching a video.
One thing that could help Instagram entice content creators to its platform is the number of its users, which has reached around 800 million in September 2017. However, this is still considerably less than the 1.5 billion users that have recently viewed content on YouTube. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the user count of Instagram is still growing, and it is likely that Instagram could reach around a billion users before June 20th. Instagram’s owner, Facebook, is also competing with YouTube in the field of video streaming through its own service, dubbed as Watch.