Vertical vs horizontal video: is Instagram changing the way we consume video content?
I’m recently 25 years old and in my quarter of a century lifetime, how we take in content has changed dramatically. In my childhood, we watched VCR tapes on tiny screen CRT TVs and cartoons on Saturday mornings on one of the four channels we had in Ireland. Now, my niece and nephew access on-demand cartoons on Netflix, watch movies on their tablets and view YouTube on their parent’s phones. The content has changed dramatically too. We used to watch what was created in large studios, now we watch indie films made by small creators, YouTube videos made by people with a passion for a certain subject, as well as big-budget, studio-produced blockbusters. One thing that remained somewhat consistent, however, was the aspect ratio of the content we were consuming.
While we may have moved from 4:3 to 16:9 widescreen, something you’ll find apparent watching old episodes of the Simpsons, the format remained landscape. The rise of smartphones has begun to change that. Creators and app developers are realising that we are viewing more and more of our content on our phones. Look around the bus or train while you’re commuting and you’ll see people watching videos on YouTube, watching movies or a TV series on Netflix, and looking at stories created by influencers on Instagram. It’s these Instagram stories where the biggest change lies. While YouTube and Netflix have mostly remained horizontal, Instagram and, originally, Snapchat introduced us to vertical content.
When Snapchat first blew up, it didn’t seem as if it had introduced something of such importance. We were all sending funny photos and captions to our friends, playing with filters, drawing on our photos, not noticing that the stories we were watching were becoming more and more curated and professional looking. By the time Instagram brought stories into their platform we were used to seeing content of a certain standard, and that standard just continued to get higher. Nowadays we’re used to seeing highly edited content on a type of platform that started as a way of sending funny photos to our friends. There are careers in the media that have been made by these stories. Doireann Garrihy went from doing impressions on Snapchat to Spin1038 and on to the 2FM morning show. Further afield, there are YouTubers like Jesse Driftwood who started off producing quality content on their Instagram stories and you can’t tap through a couple of stories without coming across an influencer flogging something.
In June of 2018 Instagram announced a new feature, IGTV. It was pegged as a real competitor to YouTube, offering creators a chance to create long-form content for Instagram. No longer confined by a 15 second limit for each video clip, creators could upload longer-form material which could be saved and viewed after the 24-hour time limit of stories. We could also save stories to highlights, allowing old followers and new followers alike the opportunity to view our vertical, on the fly content months later. Celebs even started using the live feature for announcements, Taylor Swift has made most of her announcements for her new album via Instagram live. It’s almost as if the idea of chatting to a handheld phone while drinking a glass of wine allows her to feel more connected to her fans as she easily chats and shows her cats.
So we’re used to vertical video on Instagram, and Snapchat, if for some reason you’re still there. What does that mean for the rest of our content consumption? Facebook seems to be adamant on adding stories to every product in its portfolio. Facebook, Messenger, and Whatsapp have all been burdened with this new feature that, correct me if I’m wrong, no one uses. But it’s not just Facebook who are trying to cash in on this new method of content consumption, recently YouTube has brought in channel stories to their mobile apps and now Netflix is allowing you to watch vertical previews of their shows on their app, in an interface that looks curiously like stories. When platforms such as YouTube and Netflix are not only allowing, but in Netflix’s case, are actively promoting vertical content, how long before the majority of content we watch online is vertical?
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