So Instagram launched IGTV last week (June 20th, if you want the exact date) and I've had it installed for six days now, which is apparently long enough to have Opinions about it.
For anyone who missed the rollout (unlikely if you have a phone, but still): IGTV is Instagram's new standalone app for long-form video, up to an hour for verified/big accounts, ten minutes for the rest of us. Kevin Systrom stood on stage and basically said the future of video is vertical because that's how young people hold their phones, and everyone nodded along like this was a revelation and not just... how people already watch Snapchat Stories.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's a small one but it's bugged me every single time I've opened the app: you cannot rotate the video. At all. I tried watching a cooking video (some pasta thing, wide shot of a stovetop) and the entire frame was cropped down to a vertical sliver because whoever posted it clearly filmed horizontal and IGTV just doesn't care. There's no landscape mode, no rotate-to-fill, nothing. Either you shoot vertical from the start or your content looks like garbage inside their app. That's a genuinely aggressive design choice and I don't think it's the right one.
I get the theory. Most people scroll Instagram one-handed, thumb doing all the work, phone locked in portrait, and asking someone to rotate their whole phone to watch a video is apparently a bridge too far in 2018. Fine. But music videos, product demos, anything with actual cinematography, vertical-only just guts it. I watched a trailer somebody cross-posted from a horizontal source and it felt like watching TV through a mail slot.
The other thing nobody's really talking about is how buried the actual content is. I followed maybe a dozen accounts I already follow on Instagram proper, and IGTV's home feed is mostly just... empty, or filled with stuff algorithmically shoved at me that I have zero interest in. It's the classic new-platform problem: no critical mass of good content yet, so it's mostly influencers doing "get ready with me" vlogs stretched to the ten-minute cap because longer apparently signals more effort to the algorithm, even when the content doesn't need eight extra minutes.
I'll say one genuinely positive thing: the autoplay-when-you-open-the-app trick is smart. You launch IGTV and it just starts playing something immediately, no tap required, sound and all. It's very "next episode in 5 seconds" Netflix energy applied to short video, and I can see why that keeps people in the app longer even if what's playing isn't great. Whether that's good for anyone's attention span is a separate question I'm not going to pretend to have an answer to at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Little tangent, unrelated but it's been on my mind since I tried filming something for this exact post: my phone (a two-year-old Nexus 6P, dont judge me, it still works fine for everything except the camera which has started randomly refusing to focus) died mid-recording because apparently video eats battery like nothing else. Twelve minutes of filming a stupid test clip and I went from 40% to 9%. I don't know if that's an IGTV problem specifically or just "video recording in general is brutal on old hardware," but it soured the whole experiment for me a little.
If Instagram wants IGTV to actually replace YouTube for a meaningful chunk of people, which is clearly the long game here even if nobody at the keynote said it out loud, they're going to need landscape support and a lot more reason to open a second app instead of just watching the same creators post native to Instagram Stories or, you know, YouTube. Right now it feels like a bet that "vertical and mobile-first" beats "good and flexible," and I'm not sure that bet pays off once the novelty wears off. Ask me again in six months.
Small aside since I'm on the topic of hosting your own stuff instead of handing it to a platform's algorithm: this blog's been self-hosted since day one, and these days I just git-push the whole thing over to a VPS through Tricknowtech and don't think about it again. No app to open, no format some product manager decided for me. Old fashioned, sure. Works though.