Facebook-owned Instagram today announced a new micro-video service to be added to its existing social network tools, giving users the ability to shoot videos up to 15-seconds long and post them on their timelines.
The feature is an obvious copy of Twitter's Vine video service, but it adds features to the Vine template that come straight from Instagram's own playbook, including its famous colour filters.
The other significant difference is how these videos are viewed. Vine vids are locked to a player in its mobile apps on Android and iOS, or to a once-off web viewer. Vine videos can be embedded in a web-page but browsing for cool new videos is pretty tough.
Instagram will treat video in exactly the same way that it treats photos, and makes them accessible through the same sources, including mobile apps and by logging in through any web browser on a Mac or PC.
Is 15-sec twice as good, or just too long?
Most important to the comparison of Instagram video and Vine is how the former gives users 2.5x more video to play with per post. But is this necessarily a good thing? Where does this magic 15-second figure come from?
This certainly seems like a play by Facebook to attract brands to advertise using the service. 15-seconds is a standard length for pre-roll advertisements on videos online, and a number of major brands have already jumped on the Instagram video bandwagon.
It will be interesting to see whether regular users embrace the full length of the videos too. The minimum video length is 3-seconds, so it is plausible that users will find the perfect micro-video length themselves.
Already, 15-seconds certainly feel too long, especially when all people are doing is testing out the service by taking videos of the desk in their office. Our opinion could change once the subject of the videos switches to cats on treadmills and amateur stuntmen, but we are leaning towards shorter as better at this stage.
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