Instagram launched a video-sharing tool on Thursday, in a move that will place the Facebook-owned company in direct competition with Vine, the Twitter-backed video app.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom made the announcement at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters in California, promising that Instagram video would incorporate "everything we know and love about Instagram, but it moves".
"Over the past two and a half years, Instagram has become a community where you can capture and share the world's moments simply and beautifully," Systrom said in a blogpost accompanying the announcement.
"Some moments, however, need more than a static image to come to life."
An updated version of Instagram, which was bought by Facebook for $1bn in April last year, was made immediately available on iOS and Android.
Version 4.0.0 of Instagram looks much the same as its predecessors, but the capture screen shows a video camera icon to the right of the normal image-capture button.
Users can record video in instalments – just a few seconds or tenths of seconds at a time – in a format that looks similar to that of Vine, the six-second looping video tool which was launched by Twitter in January.
Vine was initially only available for iPhone, before an Android version launched this month. Instagram video appears to have bested it by launching immediately on both platforms.
Instagram videos do not "loop" in the same way as Vines, but the Instagram format offers users up to 15 seconds of recording time instead of the sometimes-limiting six seconds on Vine.
Instagram's popularity was in part based on the special filters users could impose over their pictures, and Instagram video has similar capabilities – with 13 specially created filters available to process video.
"We're excited to see what the community will bring to video, whether it's your local cafe showing you just how they made your latte art this morning, or an Instagrammer on the other side of the world taking you on a tour of their city, a mother sharing her joys in parenting as her children laugh and play, or your favorite athlete taking you behind the scenes," Systrom wrote in his blogpost, linking to examples of Instagram video in action.
One of the benefits Instagram video will have over Vine is that it already has a dedicated audience. Instagram has 130m active users, Systrom said at the unveiling, with 1bn likes a day. Vine, which Twitter bought for $30m, launched as a new app in January, with users having to build followers from scratch.
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