Instagram Adds IGTV Video Previews to Main Feed

In an announcement on Twitter, Facebook-owned messaging app Instagram announced that previews of IGTV videos would now appear included in the main feeds on the home page.

"Now, you can preview IGTV videos in your feed. When there's a new video from someone you follow, you can tap from your feed to watch the full video in IGTV," the company tweeted on Thursday.

Ever since the launch of IGTV, Instagram has been aggressively pushing content on the platform in several ways including putting IGTV videos in the Explore tab, putting out occasional notification banners for new videos and allowing users to share IGTV previews to their own Stories.

"With IGTV previews in feed, we're making it even easier to discover and watch the latest video content from your favourite follows," Variety quoted an Instagram spokesperson as saying.

Competing with the likes of Google-owned video-sharing platform YouTube, Instagram launched IGTV in June 2018 to enable users, content creators and influencers to upload videos of up to 10 minutes to one hour in length.

Earlier this week, Instagram started rolling out Sensitivity Screens, in a bid to reduce exposure of minors to self-harming, provocative, and disturbing content on its platform. The feature blurs questionable pictures and video-thumbnails on the app until the viewer opts in.

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, announced the rollout of "sensitivity screens" in an op-ed he wrote for The Telegraph, expressing grief on the suicide of British teenager Molly Russell whose parents blamed the photo-messaging app for exposing their daughter to self-harm and suicidal content.

Written with inputs from IANS