Instagram launched IGTV back in June last year, taking on the likes of YouTube in its own way. Over the past year, the company has made efforts to make IGTV videos more prominent so as to increase engagement and discoverability. However, one drawback that always existed was the poor support for landscape videos, since the firm originally planned for the service to be consumed largely on mobile devices that are held mostly in the portrait orientation. This meant that creators would have to go the distance to create and/or edit videos to make them portrait friendly.
However, the company today announced that it is now adding support for landscape videos. The firm says that this addition comes from feedback that they received from creators and viewers. The change is important for the platform since most videos are viewed in landscape, and the added efforts for creators to tailor content to suit the platform in the past could have hurt adoption and popularity of the platform. The addition also improves user experience, since landscape videos will now be played full screen natively.
Instagram adds that they “realize this is an evolution from where IGTV started – we believe it’s the right change for viewers and creators”, and the firm likens this change to when the photo blogging site opened the platform to more than just square images in 2015. However, it is to be seen if the change does bring about higher adoption by content creators, and if the app does prove to be a contender to behemoths like YouTube.