Instagram welcomes IGTV, a new social TV channel. This innovative platform rivals both traditional TV and YouTube offering long audiovisual contents. This video app is specially addressed to celebrities, influencers, brands, or people who wants to broadcast live to their followers. This app can be used through Instagram ‘Explore’ tab, or as an independent app for iOS or Android.
IGTV is the perfect place to find videos and recommendations, and has as a main objective to offer users material from their ‘favorite content creators’. Brands interested in sharing video content must download the application, as there is still not a live shooting option, that however will be probably available in future updates.
Video format is designed to display vertical content, even when the mobile is flipped horizontally, and offers high quality recordings for more than 60 seconds. In fact, normal users are allowed to share 10 minute-videos, and popular accounts with great number of followers may post up to 1 hour of visual content.
It is important to highlight that these contents are not live videos, but previously recorded material as in YouTube. This new Instagram app not only shows 1 hour duration videos, but offers a monetization platform for developers, offering, in opposition to other platforms, new high-value options. Among its advantages, this new app allows to add links, information, direct sales… In sum, it offers brands wider marketing horizons while promoting their business solutions.
IGTV, as well as Instagram, has a lot of functionalities: Users may ‘Like’ their favorite videos, leave comments, send videos via direct message, or even see how many people have watched the video, though without knowing their user name (in contrast to Instagram Stories).
