Instagram Takes the Long View on Longform

[...]it's hardly surprising that the company, which launched as a photo-sharing app in 2010 and now offers multimedia product Stories and a tool for broadcasting live video, would add a longform video product, too. Since 15-second clips were first introduced in the Instagram feed in 2013, video consumption has grown steadily, with users watching 60 percent more video at the end of 2018 than they were at the beginning of the year. Yuki acknowledges that Instagram will cover minor production costs and help jump-start creators in a "lightweight way" but says that, at least for now, the company isn't planning to fund original programming the way Facebook has with sister video product Watch. "The first time I saw his email, I thought it was spam," she says. Since IGTV's launch, Shu has started posting weekly videos on the platform that regularly get more than a million views.