Instagram announced today that it will increase the time limit on videos uploaded to the service — quadrupling the length from 15 seconds to 60. That’s a lot of brunch.
Previously, Instagram’s 15-second videos were akin to Vines, short and sweet (though Instagram added looping functionality later on). It’s not a surprise to see that many of the creators featured in the company’s announcement video also have popular Vine accounts. The longer limit, however, sets Instagram’s eyes on a bigger prize: YouTube, which is still dominant in the online-video landscape. To that end, Instagram is also re-implementing the ability to upload multiple clips from iOS into a single video, meaning that users now have a primitive method for editing clips together.
The new maximum is rolling out today and over the coming months, the company said. The move comes as many of the web’s major platforms, including Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, make a concerted effort to emphasize video. “In the last six months, the time people spent watching video increased by more than 40 percent. And longer videos mean more diverse stories from the accounts you love,” according to an Instagram blog post.
The math on this is pretty simple: The longer the video, the longer the amount of time people spend watching it, the more ads they can sell. Not coincidentally, advertisers on Instagram have had the ability to post 60-second videos for a while. They’ve also had access to multi-image carousels, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see Instagram roll those out relatively soon as well.
