Photos are dead, long Live Photos
Most product home runs on mobile often come after dramatic improvements on the hardware side. The iPhone 4 was the first iPhone with acceptable camera capabilities and a front-facing camera. So, when Instagram was launched only a few weeks after the iPhone 4 launch in 2010, it was immediately a hit. It was the first time that you had good pictures on the iPhone thanks to good software and hardware… Timing was paramount in Instagram’s launch success and the rest is history.
Today, the iPhone 6S is to Video what the iPhone 4 was five years ago to Photos. It’s the tipping point where we all move from photos to videos for personal memories. Starting with Live Photos, we will now massively use videos for capturing, viewing and editing moments. Not only does Live Photos mean more videos, it also means better video clips and better video edits. Let me explain why.
I have been working on mobile video editing with the Replay team for a year and a half now, first as an iOS developer and now as a product manager. Replay is one of the best video editing applications on the App Store and was awarded the App of the Year award in 2014 by Apple.
Make no mistake, I love the art of photography but I have transitioned from photos to videos in recent years. When it comes to personal memories, videos are just an order of magnitude richer than photos. The moment I realized it I almost stopped taking pictures and started shooting videos. You can see in the chart below when I started using Replay intensively a little more than a year ago.
I had never made movies using Replay before and a year into using Replay as my go-to app for making great personal memories, I now know what kind of video shots make great movies. The average length of a video shot from a Hollywood movie today is 2.5 s. Logically, the key to make great personal video montages is to record several short clips. You can also clearly see that in this other chart, I only started recording short videos (under 5 seconds) a year ago and they now account for half of my videos.
Taking short videos, I have started to make honest movies flying over the Valley, of sailing in the Mediterranean. And I am not the only one to make wonderful movies from my iPhone. Tens of thousands of users are doing professional-grade Replay videos. With Replay, if you have some video clips of good quality you’ll make a professional video montage. As a user puts it: “With Replay, everyone thinks I spent hours editing videos and really it was so damn easy!”.
Years of hardware progress to get ready
Over recent years, smartphone makers have relentlessly improved their devices to improve video quality:
- Video stabilization comes as default on iPhone 6 Plus and applications like Hyperlapse or Steady can help you achieve even greater stabilization.
- The GPU power is strong enough to make effects like volumetric light effect on a tablet.
- Slow motion and fast motion have now been part of the native camera for several years.
- The 4G/LTE networks makes it possible to easily stream and sync heavy media files.
With all this hardware in place for video recording and hence editing, videos on smartphone are ready for prime time. However, the challenge we face at Replay is that our users mostly take pictures, hence create a photo slideshow with the app. We love our users’ slideshows, but they are not even close to grabbing the full magic of a Replay video montage. Thus, the biggest challenge we face at Replay is on the user behavior side. For applications like Replay to make better video memories for mobile users, we need more quality videos from our average user. This means a user should:
- Take videos instead of photos.
- Take several short videos of a scene instead of one long video. People have the habit of grabbing a memory by recording a whole scene in a single video.
With Live Photos, Apple actually killed our two biggest problems with one iPhone.
Taking more videos
With the iPhone 6S, Apple introduced Live Photos. As Apple frames it, a still photo captures an instant frozen in time. With Live Photos, you can turn those instants into unforgettable living memories. At the heart of a Live Photo is a beautiful 12‑megapixel photo. But together with that photo are the moments just before and after it was taken, captured with movement and sound.
All the photos you take with the last iPhone 6S are basically videos with a nice poster frame that happens to be a 12‑megapixel photo. Technically, the frame rate is around 15 fps — apparently lower in a low light environment - it is a little low to be a smooth video. But, at the end of the day, Live Photos are closer to videos than photos. For us, it means that the 2 trillion or more photos that are shared or taken per year by 2 billion smartphone owners (estimated by Benedict Evans) could become videos faster than we thought. With billions of people buying a device every two years, it’s possible that the number of videos (including Live Photos) on iOS devices will overtake the number of photos in 2017. Android will very likely copy the Live Photo iOS feature as they just announced the Smart Burst feature this week. We can expect Samsung (Samsung had the burst feature before Android)or a third party developer to come up with the Live Photos equivalent quickly — as it is possible on Android to replace the default camera. It’s likely we will have more videos taken than photos by 2018.
Taking better videos
The other huge win of the Live Photos for us is less obvious for people not working in the video industry. Smartphone users are going to make better, shorter, videos. The puzzle that was giving us a headache at Replay is that people record long videos.
How can you educate millions of people to take shorter video when you can’t replace the default camera on iOS? We tried to replace the default iOS camera last year. We launched Steady, a stabilized video camera app on the App Store before Instagram’s Hyperlapse. Steady looks at the data from the iPhone gyroscopes while you record your video, so it can reframe it into a smooth, steadycam-like shot when you save it. But, neither us nor Hyperlapse, with the marketing power of Instagram, are anywhere close to grabbing significant market share from the default iOS camera: Hyperlapse is ranked around 180th in the US App Store Photo & Video category — which accounts for a few thousand downloads per day according to my estimates. Even Google Maps is smaller than the default mapping app, Apple Map app, on iOS. It’s the power of the default.
If you want to change the behavior of users on iOS, it has to be Apple. And that’s what Apple is doing here. Short Videos, not Videos, are now the default. Hundreds of millions of users are going to take trillion of short videos called Live Photos. Apple knows what they are doing when forcing user to take 3s videos: as I mentioned earlier the average length of a video shot from a Hollywood movie today is 2.5 s.
What’s more, there is nothing better than learning by doing, as people take orders of magnitude more videos they are going to get better at framing, composing, working with light, capturing audio and shot composition. Format constraint makes you even more creative, there’s a good chance a lot of innovative videos will come up from Live Photos being the default behavior. It’s only the beginning.
One last bonus, Live Photos is teaching users not to shake when recording videos since they are going to adopt a position where they stand still to take a photo.
What’s next
We just received a few iPhone 6S at Stupeflix and the rest of the team has hacked a version of Replay supporting Live Photos. Here is the first Replay with Live Photos where you can meet part of the team compared to what it would have been with just Photos.
I am quite sure that we will be taking more videos than photos by 2018. Major apps are going to adopt short videos as default, as Facebook just did yesterday for profile videos. And as far as apps are concerned, you can also expect that more video apps will rule the Photos & Videos category on the App Store— or should I say the Videos & Photos category.
Special thanks to @nicosteeg, @julien_c , @jeffboudier & @sebastienrouif for proofreading and to the rest of the Stupeflix team, especially @olitiar, for hacking his way through Live Photos into Replay
