Popular photo-sharing app Instagram will allow users to upload short video clips onto its network as early as June 20. Facebook, which bought Instagram for $715 million (£455m), will unveil the new feature at an event the social network is hosting on Thursday, according to a source quoted by TechCrunch.
The source did not say whether the videos would be hosted on a separate Instagram-branded service of if they would appear in the stream of images that every Instagram user sees from the people they “follow” on the app.
[related-posts]
The move would raise Instagram’s profile in a year dominated so far by the arrival of Twitter’s Vine app, launched for the iPhone in January.
Shares of Vine clips have surpassed those of Instagram images on Twitter since the addition of an Android version of Vine this month.
This may be due in part to Instagram removing a function that allowed images hosted on the app to appear in the body of tweets.
Instagram’s 100 million users are being encouraged to view the photo app as a social network rather than just a photography tool, which would mean any new video capability would add a second reason for users to spend time on it without sharing images through other networks.
Credit: Tech Crunch
