As the most experienced long-video Instagrammer, welcome to the club

It appears my friend Justin was spot on: I probably was part of a test group trialling longer Instagram videos since April.
   Today, Instagram announced that people could upload 10-minute videos, and an hour for those with big followings.
   This news article (hat tip to Cachalot Sang on Twitter) says there’ll be a new app called IGTV, although I’ve always just uploaded mine via regular Instagram. I haven’t cracked nine minutes yet, but I’ve uploaded videos in the high eights. Regular Instagram seemed to balk at doing anything too large. Also bear in mind—arguably from someone who has had more experience of this than anyone in Instagram-land—that these uploads take ages and can sometimes fail.
   Don’t be disappointed if your views are low, since Instagram only counts full views. I have videos still saying they have had zero views, yet I have likes and, in some cases, comments. Not everyone’s going to sit back and watch these in full.
   I had noticed that in the last week, my videos, all of which are over a minute, have successfully uploaded—up from the one in two ratio that I experienced when Instagram first gave me the ability to upload videos longer than one minute in April. No wonder, if the official announcement was made today: they probably began allowing all the big ones through.
   As the one user (that I know of) who has publicly been uploading videos of over a minute for nearly two months, welcome to the club. I hope you’ll enjoy it.


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5 thoughts on “As the most experienced long-video Instagrammer, welcome to the club

  1. Enjoy it.

    I started to come back. I came back to WhatsApp, after finding their updated TOS adequate. I did not feel that way about Instagram’s. Not that I fully believe anything Facebook promises to do or not to do, but their WhatsApp TOS is pretty explicit about NOT sharing data with Facebook, and says all communications now have end-to-end encryption. So, unless they are flat-out lying in big print (okay, so, probably, but at least I have a clear screenshot of it)…

    IG is more like transparency in abusing your data and promising no privacy whatsoever. Not that I care that MUCH, mind you, but it’s still a matter of principle.

  2. I wonder if the change in TOS is meaningless, since they already shared that data in 2016. If you missed out on the 30-day opt-out period (and I did, since I seldom use cellphone messaging apps), then Facebook already has your Whatsapp data. When I found out that my data had gone earlier this year, I went cold turkey and stopped using Whatsapp. They can Hoover my Instagram data for the time being but that’s the only Facebook-owned service I regularly use. The minute a rival service comes out (will Pixelfed be it?), I may leave Instagram.

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