If you’re an Instagram user for quite some time, there’s a good chance that you might have seen a radio type button in the top right corner of your Instagram app. Some of you may also know that the button actually belongs to IGTV, which is a long-form video content sharing platform of Instagram launched in 2018. But it turns out that you – and most of the other Insta users too – have not been using that button, so now it’s going away.
That’s right. According to a recent news report published by Techcrunch, Facebook-owned Instagram has decided to remove the IGTV button from its main app because nobody has been using it. And before you question us about what happens to your IGTV videos and the videos of others created on IGTV, we want to tell you that the platform itself is not going anywhere – IGTV will work as it does. Only the button to access it from the main Instagram app is now going away. The standalone app of IGTV and IGTV page in the Explore tab will exist as it does today.
Now, if you’re not aware of IGTV, that’s no big deal. The app has not been a major hit among social media users, because it has gained only a little more than a million downloads since its launch in 2018. That’s nothing in comparison to the 80 million downloads of TikTok, another video sharing platform launched around the same time (these are the figures for the US). When it was launched people had thought of it more like a YouTube competitor, but after the arrival of TikTok, it has also been facing competition from a new unexpected player.
If you’re an IGTV fan, don’t worry. It’s not going away anytime soon. But it’s clear that if Facebook wants it to gain popularity, it badly needs to incorporate some new features in this platform.
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