Instagram Introduces Video And No They Don’t Own InstagramVideo.com And No They Don’t Need It

Instagram Video

Today Instagram sent shockwaves through the tech world by introducing a new video feature that is making news, well, just about everywhere on the planet. If you don’t use Instagram, well, to be perfectly honest, that just makes you old. That’s right I said it. Instagram is one of the most successful startups of the last ten years and sold for $1B (yes billion) to Facebook, and the company only had 14 employees, boom!

The service has over 130 million active users and 40 million photos are posted on it every single day. There are 8,500 likes per second taking place on Instagram and over 1,000 comments per second and 26 of the top 100 brands in the world have over 10,000 followers on the popular photo sharing service. (data sources – Instagram and Simply Measured)

13% of users on the Internet use Instagram with their main demographic falling between the age of 18-29, and yes, that’s why I called you old up above so please don’t take it personally. (data source – bufferapp.com) While Instagram is one of the major startup  success stories of the decade Vine has been absolutely rocking it, reaching a very similar audience but doing it with short videos easily shared through twitter.

Less than a week after Vine released their app for the iPhone they overtook Instagram for the number of people linking to it on Twitter (source – Upstart Business Journal). Well it seems that Instagram has decided it’s time to put an end to that announcing Instagram Video today. You can see a demo of the new app below:


Instagram has decided to go with 15 second videos rather than 6 seconds which is the max time for a Vine video. When asked how they picked 15 seconds they said it was “an artistic choice” or, what I think they really meant was, “haha twice as long as Vine”. Of course there’s no right or wrong answer here and it is certain that the Instagram community is going to have a lot of fun with the new version of the app.

Now for a much smaller part of the story which might be interesting to some of my readers but really doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things. Instagram does not own InstagramVideo.com, this was registered some time ago and yes, it is a Trademark violation so can be taken from the cybersquatter that registered it whenever the heck Instagram wants it, which might be never. The domain appears to have been originally registered in February of last year by someone in Australia but is now under privacy protection.

As an app I don’t think Instagram will really care very much about this domain, nor do I think it’s going to get a lot of traffic since the people who use Instagram are looking for it on the app store. Vine launched on Vine.co and  ended-up being one of the fastest growing apps in app store history. Still I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this domain make its way back to Instagram over the coming months.

Either way one thing is for certain, the short video app war has begun and Instagram and Vine are going to duke it out. It’s Twitter vs. Facebook and in the end a whole new way for people to share content. I’ve been a huge fan of Vine as many of you know and I look forward to using Instagram video, let the games begin!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton