Kevin Systrom, Co-founder of Instagram:
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Video on Instagram and bring you another way to share your stories. When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.
A couple of thoughts on this:
1) I think square-cropping the video is smart. Reality is that everyone wants to shoot video holding their phone in portrait, but portrait videos look awful. The same reasons why square-cropping photos was smart in the original design of Instagram is now also doubly-smart when dealing with video.
2) Fifteen seconds is a long time. It is a bold move when Vine has made 6 seconds the norm for this medium. I’m not sure which one is feels more ‘right’ yet.
3) They’ve integrated it into the existing stream really well. There’s a very slight delay on playback, where if you’re scrolling fast it won’t play, but if you linger over a video, it will start playing back. It feels great.
4) It came to Android and iPhone at the same time.
5) I love that whenever a service like this launches, everyone stops posting beautiful, meticulously-composed shots & just literally presses the button on whatever’s around them. I’ve seen more work desks, homes, monitors, cups of coffee or bottles of water today than I’ve seen in a year. I love it.