Instagram announces IGTV | Hacker News Reader

Instagram announces IGTV

instagram-press.com

48 pointsprawn49 comments

I've recently read a report about how media optimized for addictiveness impacts children's development [0] and found this sentence from the IGTV announcement particularly jarring: "Just like turning on the TV, IGTV starts playing as soon as you open the app".

[0] https://5rightsframework.com/static/5Rights-Disrupted-Childh...

Thanks for the reference! Already shared with my parents who are quite worried about my phone-obsessed teenage sibling.

I wonder if the backend of IGTV is the same as the one that powers Facebook inline video content? Either the same technology, or the same infrastructure...

I also can't shift the feeling that IGTV is designed to pull 'influencers' away from YouTube.

At this point Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are just different front-ends to the same services behind it. They all use Facebook servers and technology.

Do you work at Facebook?

No, you can tell by the design and the servers they use.

I wonder if it’s less having to pull them and more providing the raft so they can jump.

Youtubers rarely have good things to say about the platform anymore.

YouTubers talk even more shit about Facebook. You can find basically every semi popular YouTube video on Facebook. Some even have more views on Facebook than they do on YouTube.

Instagram will have the same problem very soon and will turn just as shitty as YouTube.

yes i read 20th june an amazing feature introduce by instagram. IGtv Views , Will give tough time to YouTube . https://smmpoint.com/buy-instagram-tv-views/ look like many website now helping to increasing views

It's nice-looking but feels more like an extended Instagram Stories than an actual YouTube competitor.

I was wondering what features will exactly make it the proper YouTube competitor, and I had the same feeling about it being more or less extended stories.

On the other hand, YouTube seems to be set on making every other platform more attractive at the moment, so let's see how it plays out.

Yep - discovery still looks to be hit and miss, that's the key for a YT competitor, not just the length of video.

Discovery on YouTube sucks so much they might as well not have it.

Why do you say that. I've found it to have great recommendations.

It's recommendations aren't bad per se once it's gotten to know you, but at least for me it doesn't provide much in the way of discovery of new content: it's mostly digging up related material from the archives of people I already follow or are aware of, or short clips/compilations.

I'm mainly interested in computer science, engineering and professional race driving. What I get recommended are videos about the second world war and car crash compilations. Every three to four months a video that is actually interesting shows up.

And the recommendations when watching a video is even worse. I'm watching video about voting systems and all the recommendations are car crash compilations.

I must have been sorted into a very stupid pool of viewers.

If you tie it to a Google account you can tune them by watching videos on topics you are interested in, as well as flagging videos & channels with "Not Interested". Their algorithms are definitely eager to find you a flood of content you'll enjoy. The hard part is seeding it with high quality channels.

IMO it's too eager. I watch 1 video of dashcam crashes, and my recommendations get polluted with them. Same with 1 video of tennis. The algorithm seems designed to keep eyeballs in the app. This lead me to switch to NewPipe on Android, where the "front page" of the app is customizable, so I just leave it to "most popular videos in $country", they all happen to be music videos and not have click-baity titles.

I think this is a recent change (over the past couple of years?) in their algorithm.

Every now and then I will watch a video which will cause my recommendations to be flooded with nothing but stuff like that video, and videos from series that I have been watching regularly for years get buried.

Might not provide enough revenue (or not be monetized at all) so they don't prioritize the other videos.

My best guess is it's designed to recommend the higher ad paying videos, I can only imagine dash cam videos are extremely monetized. I would wager it's not about keeping you watching, but keeping you profitable, it's not their fault the people uploading exploit what people will watch for hours, just their benefit.

It is in my opinion too eager. Watch one high quality dash cam video and you'll get flooded with hundreds of copies of the same videos for days.

My YouTube recommendations are spot-on.. very odd! Perhaps your privacy settings are high and mighty?

90% of the time they are spot on. But watch a few historically accurate videos on WWII and it'll start recommending videos from Holocaust deniers. Or watch some moon landing documentaries and you'll start getting videos peddling moon landing conspiracies. It's infuriating.

YouTube search prioritises video content, not the creator - for most of my searches I couldn't give a wotsit about who it was that made the video, just what it contains.

So, the race to squeeze out "influencers" for all their ad worth has started?

First Youtube rolls out a Sponsor button to try and stop people from those going to Patreon. Then it tries to force people to monetize their videos even if the creator doesn't want to.

Now Instagram wants people to stay on their platform and not re-direct people to other video sites.

Will i ever understand the logic behind giving user one minute videos first, and then building IGTV years later?

Take your pick:

- Difficulty

- Market Research that suggested otherwise

- Lack of market penetration versus competitors

Launching a 1 minute video platform is much easier than building a live streaming platform, and maybe it wasn't the right time for them to launch a live recording platform or would have hurt some of their other ambitions?

The abilities of a feature complement its positioning to users. I would imagine that the limited 1 minute videos are in the main Instagram app, where they would likely want to retain the feel of Instagram, which wouldn't work well with long form content. Now IGTV might be their play for long form content. Sure, both are video, and both are from Instagram, but two very different ways of positioning video, for different purposes, in different places, targeting different people.

Chicken and egg: short videos can still be kind of bearable when amateurishly produced, the length limitation serves as guiderails. Now that much of the content consumed on Instagram is thoroughly professional, they can open the limit. Did anyone else notice how the announcement doesn't include a single line about how users would create those longer videos?

I'm excited because I follow a lot of video content creators on instagram, having to switch to youtube or twitch.tv to actually watch their content. If I can get all of their pictures/text announcements and video content in one place I will be very happy. Though as a separate app, it doesn't sound like it'll be integrated as nicely with instagram as I'd hope for.

EDIT: I missed that it can be watched from within the instagram app too, this is almost perfect! I just need landscape video support so I'm not watching streamers play in vertical mode and I can finally stop using youtube.

Why would you want to give even more power to Facebook? It's bad enough that they were allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. At least online video should belong to a different company.

To look at it optimistically, or maybe naively, ever increasing centralization will increase our incentive to devise decentralized alternatives and generally decrease our tolerance for such colossal clusters of power. Facebook and the like are already profanely large and important. That could be the only reason to give more power to Facebooks of the world – to quicken their downfall.

A sort-of test of this theory is the current US administration. During the election, some anti-establishment and left activists called for Trump to be elected. They felt like society didn't want to be fixed, or was beyond fixing. Dishearted, they decided that the faster this unsustainable state of affairs reaches its climax the better. Enter Trump.

There's a noteworthy counteracting force though. As, the documentary maker, Adam Curtis argues in HyperNormalisation, for the last few decades, the principal objective of our ruling class is to maintain stability and reduce risk. Risk, as a word, has actually been bizzarely relevant during this time. Look at how its use in the Google Books corpus shoots up starting in the seventies [0]. Of course, virtually any ruling class always opposed power redistribution, but what Curtis is trying to demonstrate is that our current establishment has become extremely adept at it, in part thanks to the advent of computing and internet.

An interesting area of focus for socioeconomic studies is how specifically stability of power distribution is maintained, in this day, and how those mechanisms could be compromised.

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=risk&year_star...

It's not that I want to give more power to Facebook, it's that it's more convenient for my use case. Sure Facebook has too much power, but so does Google and I'd rather my video watching data was all aggregated in a much smaller ecosystem that only encompasses my social life and not my entire web browsing habits, email, phone use, etc.

So yeah, I want to transfer the power from Google to Facebook for now until a better option comes along.

If you think that Facebook doesn't already know your web browsing habits and phone use. I have bad news for you. They don't have email that is true, but they have WhatsApp and FB Messenger which might be worse.

I can't imagine this will be very well used. It's obviously a reaction to influencers and monetizing on ad revenue from them but I have to wonder how many will install two different Instagram apps...

(The influencer will also be on the main one.)

And I am surprised this couldn't be efficiently integrated to the main app. Is it about branding? I mean... They just increased the clip length. Couldn't those clips be shown prominently for/on the user in the main app?

I'm getting stuck on the issue of two different apps because I think that's where the most friction will be.

Wait, didn’t the article explicitly mention that it’s also in the main app, or did I misread?

“While there’s a stand-alone IGTV app, you’ll also be able to watch from within the Instagram app so the entire community of one billion can use it from the very start.”

Ooh I must have missed that when I saw this yesterday. I directly went to the App Store and saw the new IGTV app and just assumed it was a new separate product although with their existing user base.

What is it? Intended to compete with YouTube?

I think it sounds more like IRL on Twitch TV.

Wow those app icons are terrible.

> "...it’s built for how you actually use your phone, so videos are full screen and vertical."

Oh dear.

I don't understand why vertical video always gets this response, mostly from people who do anything with film.

I get it, it's not the most cinematic experience but who actually wants to hold their phone sideways while scrolling through a feed, or switch apps etc? It just doesn't make sense to do it any other way. Also as most video is even filmed in portrait mode.

Vertical video is awful because it doesn't capture any of the surroundings of the subject, and instead wastes those pixels it on filming what's above & below the subject (which 99% of the time is irrelevant).

For traditional media yes, but for influencers it fits their face and the product just fine and landscape is actually a waste.

A sad reality.

Depends what those "influencers" are about. A lot of successful Youtube influencers actually show off something else besides their face and for those the mandatory vertical video wouldn't cut it.

Compatibility with an installed base of several billion televisions, for starters. Periscope handles this like a champ imho, even their recorded .ts streams encode orientation switching so that it works flawlessly either way and you can switch midstream.

I'm not sure how much IG Stories or Snapchat accounts you follow - but at least the ones I usually follow don't need any compatibility with traditional TVs. It's mostly people talking (portrait mode works well for...portraits) or showing something while holding their phone with one hand. Widescreen video isn't really necessary for that.

Fundamentally human vision is landscape. We live in a landscape. Interesting things are generally to the left and right of us, not above and below.

I think one day phone cameras will have square or cross-shaped sensors and you'll be able to easily shoot landscape video while holding your phone vertically.

For viewing, I think it isn't the physical rotation of the phone that is a pain - it's selecting the full-screen option, or the rotate controls. The latest Android makes this better, but I hope in future apps will just play landscape videos in landscape irrespective of the phone rotation.

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