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Friday 21 June 2013

Instagram Launches Video Feature Similar To Vine


Yesterday, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announced that the new version of Instagram would allow users to record short, Vine-like videos on the app, describing the feature as "everything you love about Instagram — and it moves".

Facebook revealed that there would be an announcement about a big change to one of its features a week ago. The social media world quickly realised that the update would be an Instagram video feature, putting the service directly in competition with Twitter’s affiliate Vine.

Vine was an instant success when it came out early this year, climbing to the top of the download charts and capturing the imaginations of its 13 million users. Vine’s meteoric success was a wake up call to Facebook employees, who realised that they needed to quickly release a competitor using their affiliate image sharing service Instagram.

Although Instagram’s video creation software is similar to Vine in principle, it has many new and interesting features that set it apart from its Twitter-owned competitor. For example, Vine videos can only be up to six seconds long, while Instagram videos can be between three and fifteen seconds.

Instead of pressing the screen in general to record, users press a little record button near the bottom. Pressing the screen will auto-adjust the video’s focus, an improvement on Vine’s unfocused video filming. A ‘Cinema’ function improves the video even further by stabilizing the image.

Instagram allows users to not only add filters to their videos – the filters are similar to picture filters, but with new names – but also choose a cover frame to appear in the Instagram feed, or the Facebook news feed. Users can also edit their videos mid-record by deleting recorded sections.

Unlike Vines, Instagram videos don’t autoplay and they don’t loop, which, depending on your preference, makes them better or worse than Vine videos. Instagram also learnt from a number of Vine mistakes, releasing on both Android and iOS at the same time and incorporating hashtags from the start.

It is unlikely that Vine will be killed off by Instagram video but, thanks to Instagram’s 130 million-strong user base, ten times the number Vine has, it will probably become more popular.

What do you think of Instagram video?

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