Instagram’s IGTV was supposed to usher in a new era for video in the social network, but that’s not quite how it panned out. And now, the company is tempering its expectations. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to TechCrunch that Instagram is removing the IGTV icon at the top of its main interface. “Very few” people use the icon, Facebook said instead, most are watching IGTV videos through their main feed, the relevant Explore channel, user profiles or the dedicated IGTV app.
According to the report by TechCrunch, Instagram has decided to remove the IGTV icon from the main app as very few people from its user base of over 1 billion users were using it.
There have been a number of concessions over IGTV in the past. Instagram eventually allowed landscape videos rather than insisting on vertical clips, and it just recently enabled the option to post IGTV videos directly from the standard app. This, however, may be one of the more significant changes yet it’s taking away convenient access to the feature.
Notably, while the company has ditched the IGTV icon from the main app, the feature itself isn’t going anywhere yet. Instagram users can still access the IGTV videos by tapping on the IGTV icon on the bottom left corner of a post in their Feeds. Alternatively, users can also visit their favourite creators’ or friends’ profile to watch IGTV videos by them.
Apart from the main app, users can also download Instagram’s stand-alone IGTV app to watch long-form vertical videos by their friends and favourite creators.
The spokesperson didn’t say why use of the button was low. It might be a simple matter of the way people use Instagram, though. As a social network, people primarily use it to catch up with friends and share snippets of their daily lives they’re not necessarily going to watch a five-minute professionally shot video they could probably find on YouTube. Add in the lack of revenue for creators and there aren’t many reasons to use IGTV when the usual shorter Instagram videos will do the trick.
