Instagram IGTV is on a constant quest to justify its existence, now supports landscape videos

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In what could be a major change of strategy for Instagram, Instagram's standalone video-only app IGTV now also supports landscape videos in addition to vertical videos, Instagram announced in its blog post.

Instagram's IGTV app has been around for almost a year now. Instagram says that they have learnt a lot in the IGTV's first year and now acting upon the feedback received from both IGTV creators and viewers, Instagram is enabling support for landscape videos. 

"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," Instagram said in its blog post.

At the time of announcing IGTV's debut last year, Instagram was pretty clear with its decision to support only vertical videos. Instagram had said that IGTV is built for how users actually use their phone, hence videos are full screen and vertical. But that doesn't mean all video creators only record vertical videos.

So in a nutshell, Instagram is looking to fix the problem viewers face while watching vertical videos that are sometimes shot in landscape.

Apparently, Instagram is leaving no stones unturned and trying everything possible to get more content creators onboard in an attempt to boost its viewership. Instagram also has plans to push more IGTV previews into the main app's home feed.

"(We are) enabling creators to publish previews of IGTV videos to their Instagram feed, which added another way for viewers to discover IGTV videos."

READ | Instagram video app IGTV is becoming more and more like TikTok and Snapchat

In February, Instagram announced its decision to push out IGTV previews in your main Instagram feed. As a result, you can soon expect your Instagram feed to be relatively cluttered.

IGTV has also undergone a design overhaul and significant changes in terms of ways people discover new videos on the platform, similar to TikTok's AI algorithm and Snapchat's 2x grid interface. It will be interesting to watch how Instagram actually evolves from here.