A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO IGTV

Serena Williams Her intimate videos are performative but no less powerful.

Will Smith

The movie star has chats about big ideas, like “How do you Ťnd your purpose?”

Lele Pons

What’s Cooking? is a charming bake-off each episode between the digital star and a friend.

Anwar Jibawi

The digital comedian’s One Star With Anwar cheekily reviews low-rated products.

Netflix

Features trailers, clips, and high-concept stunts, like Riverdale star Cole Sprouse eating a burger for an hour.

Louis Vuitton

The venerable fashion house has created compelling runwayshow videos.

The leap felt natural given the success Instagram had been having with Stories. According to James Whatley, a strategy partner at Ogilvy U.K., Facebook recently told the agency that “40% of time spent in Instagram is now spent in Stories.” But Stories segments can only be 15 seconds apiece. Instagram’s Live service, which launched in November 2016, was another proof of concept: Users often went back to rewatch live streams. IGTV was initially just a code name, but it stuck. IGTV’S mission may be similar to Google-owned Youtube’s, but Krieger and Systrom wanted the likeness to end there. They latched onto vertical video and tried to keep things simple and intimate. When users tap into IGTV (via a small button to the right of the Instagram logo), full-screen video immediately starts playing. A single swipe starts the next one. To navigate around, there’s a singlerow tray that displays more clips. “So it’s not like, ‘I’m going back to a guide,’ ” Krieger says. “You’re still in the experience.” By December 2017, the internal pitch presentation was ready. By February, the team was in place. Four months after that, IGTV launched at a splashy event in San Francisco with avocado toast, selfie stations, and IGTV clips by Kim Kardashian and beauty influencer Manny Gutierrez playing on huge, portrait-mode screens. Tellingly, the videos had to be reformatted minutes before the event was supposed to begin after a technical snafu deleted the files, delaying the affair by an hour. Sources say that the overall rollout of IGTV was affected by the “political shit show” going on between Facebook and Instagram. Krieger acknowledges that the development time for IGTV was unusually fast. “I’ll tell you what went wrong in Stories and what went right in IGTV,” he says, leaning forward in his chair. “With Stories, we were in there for every single decision, which meant that we had a hand in that product at a very detailed level.” But often, that meant when Krieger and Systrom’s attention had to be elsewhere, Stories’ developers would be stuck waiting for answers. The cofounders stepped back during the IGTV build in order to empower the team. Another expediting factor was that Systrom was on paternity leave. “So if you were gonna call him, it had to be really important,” Krieger says, laughing. Despite reports of tensions between Instagram’s leaders and their Facebook overlords, Krieger was magnanimous when discussing the role Facebook played in IGTV’S creation. Although IGTV ultimately competes for attention with the year-old Facebook Watch, Krieger says the IGTV team had weekly meetings with Fidji Simo, Facebook VP of video, where “it was like, ‘Here’s all we’re learning. Anything that stands out from what you learned?’ ” In addition, “We had [Facebook’s] world-class video infrastructure just waiting to be integrated with,” he says. Once IGTV was live, there were issues. Content jumped from low-quality DIY videos of teens in their bedrooms to sleek Mercedesbenz–branded clips. (Worse, graphic videos depicting child abuse were discovered in September as being algorithmically recommended to users; Instagram apologized and removed them, though it didn’t ban the users who posted them.) The lack of any playlist or curation features made navigation within IGTV difficult. Krieger doesn’t flinch when reminded of any grievances. Instead, he smiles and reveals another gripe: Shortly after launch, his wife told him, “‘That little banner [that comes up at the top of Instagram when someone you follow posts an IGTV video]? I never tap on it.’ And I’m like, We clearly have work to do.” He admits that IGTV’S presence within every aspect of Instagram—the feed, Stories, the Explore tab, and user profiles—needs to be better thought through. “Those are [version] 0.5, not even [version 1 issues], because we’re just getting out there to learn,” he says. “And now it’s a matter of figuring out how it integrates with the rest of the system.” Two weeks later, though, he and Systrom were out. F ACEBOOK WAS ONCE DEFINED BY THE BIFURCATION AT

the top of its leadership: There were product people, like Zuckerberg, Systrom, and Krieger, and businessfolk, like COO Sheryl Sandberg.

IGTV product chief Ashley Yuki represents a new wave of leader within the organization, one with experience in both disciplines, much like Simo, her counterpart at Facebook Watch. Yuki studied business and engineering as an undergrad at the Wharton School, and she’s shifted between advertising and product roles since she joined Facebook, in 2013. At Instagram, which has been her focus for