IGTV Now Supports Landscape Videos

From Baby Ariel’s Love Triangle series to The Rock’s Mana and Gratitude series to Jameela Jamil’s I Weigh interview series with Sam Smith and Lizzo, it’s been amazing to see the vertical videos that our community has shared on IGTV.

We’ve learned and grown a lot in this first year. In meeting with creators and viewers, we’ve heard about what they like – and what needs to be improved. In fact, that feedback has driven many of IGTV’s biggest changes so far. This includes the most important change we made this year: enabling creators to publish previews of IGTV videos to their Instagram feed, which added another way for viewers to discover IGTV videos. Since that launched February, we’ve seen viewers spending more time with IGTV and a surge of new original content from creators of all sizes.

Today marks yet another change for IGTV – and it once again comes from listening to our creators and viewers. We’ve heard from creators who want to upload landscape videos for IGTV. Similarly, we’ve heard from viewers who come across landscape videos in IGTV but want to watch them in a more natural way.

That’s why we’re announcing support for landscape videos in addition to vertical. Ultimately, our vision is to make IGTV a destination for great content no matter how it’s shot so creators can express themselves how they want.

We realize this is an evolution from where IGTV started – we believe it’s the right change for viewers and creators. In many ways, opening IGTV to more than just vertical videos is similar to when we opened Instagram to more than just square photos in 2015. It enabled creativity to flourish and engagement to rise – and we believe the same will happen again with IGTV.

For viewers, this means IGTV will be a place to watch even more content from the creators they love – and do it straight from their phone. For creators, this means more freedom to express themselves how they want. Vertical videos work great for creators who want to be up-close and personal with their audience; but landscape also has its strengths, especially when it comes to formats like dance and sports which are high motion and often feature a handful of people in frame.

We want to say thank you to all the creators who are building meaningful, strong, and diverse communities and helping create the future of TV on mobile. This is just the beginning. We’ll continue to evolve to not only help you grow your communities, but build your businesses across IGTV and Instagram.