Facebook has introduced Video on Instagram, as you can see in the video ad posted above. The app was announced today by Instagram’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom.
The new app will let people create 15 second videos to share on Instagram, ending the long quest for a way to post brief videos there. There will also be simple editing available, as well as 13 filters that you can apply to your videos.
Just as you can now quickly post bad, blurred, color-unbalanced photos to Instagram and call it art, presumably you’ll now be able to do the same with video.
Kidding, guys. And I’ve got to admit that Instagram has allowed celebrities to post a lot of silly photos that most of us ordinary mortals would never otherwise see, so I can just imagine the video potential.
Twitter recently acquired a very short video-sharing app called Vine , which allows users to easily post six second videos. However, that app doesn’t yet allow for the use of filters.
Well, it hasn’t escaped anybody’s notice that the Facebook is now pitting itself toe-to-toe against Twitter. In fact, Techcrunch reported that Vine announced several new features to their video-sharing app just hours before the Video on Instagram launch.
However, Video on Instagram will have a truly enormous reach when it rolls out to all Instagram users on iOS and Android. Systrom claimed at today’s press event that Instagram has 130 million monthly users who have shared 16 billion photos.
When asked why Video for Instagram selected the 15 second time frame, Systrom resisted the urge to point and giggle at Twitter user’s short attention span. He merely said that it felt right and that it was an artistic choice.
He also pointed to the Cinema feature , an image stabilization feature that will prevent the handheld smartphone videos from being as blurry as I might have feared.
To get started using Video on Instagram , just visit the Instagram site.
[iphone image viewer photo by Mosman Council via Creative Commons]
