Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) had a highly anticipated press conference on Thursday to announce their latest product, an Instagram video-sharing service.
The announcement was made at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Last week members of the tech press received invitations to the event, which read “a small team has been working on a big idea,” but didn’t give more information than that.
The company’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg handed the stage to Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who stressed Instagram’s huge growth, citing 16 billion photos shared and 130 million users. In developing video-sharing for Instagram, Systrom said the company focused on three things; “First, simplicity. Simplicity really, really matters here. Video is complex; it’s hard to edit, it’s hard to manage, it’s hard to upload. The second thing: it has to be beautiful. If it isn’t beautiful, it isn’t Instagram. The third thing: community. From day one, 130 million people will have access to recording the world’s video.”
The video mode records up to 15 seconds of video and utilizes 13 different custom filters similar to the photography ones that helped make Instagram popular. Systrom said 15 seconds was the right balance between not being too short and not having to worry about lengthy uploading time. He also promised that from “day one,” the service will be available on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android devices. Instagram video will include a video stabilization technique called Cinema that hopes to end the days of shaky mobile phone videos.
Instagram has been looking to develop a way to compete with Twitter’s popular Vine video sharing function.
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