Technology

Instagram is preparing to unveil a home for longer-form video — a YouTube competitor and its take on Snapchat Discover. According to multiple sources, Instagram will offer a dedicated space featuring scripted shows, music videos and more in vertically oriented, full-screen, high-def 4K resolution. Instagram has been meeting with popular social media stars and content publishers to find out how their video channels elsewhere would work within its app. Italso lining up launch partners for an announcement of the long-form video effort tentatively scheduled for June 20th.

The public shouldn&t expect Netflix Originals or HBO-level quality. This is not &InstaGame of Thrones.& Instead, the feature is more focused on the kind of videos you see from YouTube creators. These often range from five to 15 minutes in length, shot with nice cameras and lighting but not some massive Hollywood movie production crew. Average users will be able to upload longer videos too, beyond the current 60-second limit.

Instagram intends to eventually let creators and publishers earn money off the longer videos, though it hasn&t finalized how accompanying ads like pre-rolls and mid-breaks or revenue splits would work. It is not paying creators up-front for shows like Facebook Watch, either. But the videos will each feature a swipe-up option to open a link, which creators can use to drive traffic to their websites, e-commerce stores or event ticketing. Thanks to Instagram800 million-plus users, the video section could be a powerful marketing tool beyond generating cash for creators directly.

The long-form video section will spotlight a collection of popular videos, and provide a &continue watching& option since users might view long clips over the course of several sessions. Users will also see the long-form clips featured on authors& profiles near the Stories Highlights bubbles.Creators won&t be able to shoot and post long-form videos, as the section will only allow pre-made video uploads.

Instagram has previously offered Spotlight Collections that assemble multiple videos into a non-stop viewing experience

This new information from TechCrunchsources comes after a brief initial report by The Wall Street Journal yesterday that Instagram was talking to content publishers about a vertical video feature. The WSJarticle focused on the ability for average users to post up to hour-long clips, but the real story here is Instagram launching a professionally produced video entertainment hub. Instagram declined our request for comment.

Itunclear what the new video feature will be named, or where it will appear. It could possibly live in the Explore tab, get its own tab or even be spun out into a separate app. Our sources didn&t know how the videos would work with the main Instagram feed, where they could appear full-length or show up as previews to alert a publisherfans to their newest long-form clip. The announcement date or feature details could still potentially change.

FacebookWatch section of long-form video hasn&t proven popular

Facebook hasn&t had much luck with its own original long-form video section it launched in August 2017, Facebook Watch. Mediocre, unscripted reality shows and documentary clips haven&t proven a draw for the social network, which is now expanding into scripted programs and news shows. Instagram may prove a more natural home for lean-back entertainment content.

InstaTube

The Instagram long-form video section will be Facebookanswer to two competing social video destinations ityet to successfully clone.

SnapchatDiscover section offers exclusive, professionally produced vertical video shows from an array of publishers as an alternative to shaky user-generated Stories. But with sagging user growthendangering viewership,backlash to the redesignthat buries Discover and a policy shift to stop paying Discover publishers up front, Instagram and its massive user count may be able to seduce publishers to bring longer videos to its app instead.

YouTube is the stronger foe. Its ad revenue sharing agreements and massive engagement have made it the go-to platform for video makers. Still, creators are always looking to build their fan bases, earn more money and promote their other online presences. Instagramwildfire growth and the familiarity of following people there could make the long-form video section worth embracing.

The feature has big potential as long as itnot too interruptive of peopleentrenched feed-scrolling and Story-tapping behavior patterns. Instagram will also have to convince creators to shoot their content vertically or find ways to gracefully crop it, and some may be apprehensive if they typically shoot in landscape for traditional video players.

The Facebook family of apps might never be able to match the breadth and depth of YouTubevideo catalog. But Instagram has an opportunity here to skim the best content off the top of the sprawling creator/publisher ecosystem and curate it coherently for casual audiences. That could get us spending more time with Instagram, even if our friends are boring.

Internet platforms removing objectionable content from their sites has been one of the more difficult challenges for tech companies in recent years. Valve has also determined that ita pretty difficult challenge in their Steam gaming store, but unlike some of the other major platforms on the web, they&ve decided they&re not going to do anything unless the content is actually illegal or, as they put it, &straight up trolling.&

The company has also asserted that &the games we allow onto the Store will not be a reflection of Valvevalues…&

Hereexactly what else Valve employee Erik Johnson said in a company blog post, which you should read in full here:

Valve shouldn&t be the ones deciding this. If you&re a player, we shouldn&t be choosing for you what content you can or can&t buy. If you&re a developer, we shouldn&t be choosing what content you&re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

This post is largely in response to the companyactions regarding a school shooting simulator (pictured above) that caused the ire of many. Valve removed the title from the store, but said it did so because the creator was previously banned and was a &troll.&

There are certainly plenty of those in the gaming community who would hold tightly to the idea that people will buy what they want to and Valve shouldn&t decide which content makes it onto their PC. Honestly, that could be a pretty ideologically defensible position if you didn&t think about the money changing hands here. The problem is Valve takes a pretty big cut of the revenue from titles sold through the store, so when it says that it doesn&t agree with content, that doesn&t mean that it doesn&t want the money it makes from it.

If Valve wants to find objectionable content and then forego their cut while keeping the games available for download thatone thing, and they can probably stick by the words in their blog post a bit more as a result.

Finding the line in terms of what is okay and what isn&t in gaming is admittedly painfully difficult. You can kill cops and mow down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto V, which has brought in billions of dollars in revenue single-handedly, but ultimately I think its maker, Rockstar Games, would at least say that they can stand by their game. If Valve isn&t willing to stand by the games they sell as part of their &values,& do they even have values as a company that… sells games

YouTube is having what seems to border on an existential crisis right now as they have to decide how to monetize videos on their site that contain &objectionable content.& Valve can hide from this kind of a crisis, but they can&t avoid it. Ad-supported models tend to obscure the money exchanging hands, but when someone buys a game on Steam, money goes directly to Valve as an effect.

Valve can ultimately do what it wants here; they can decide that they want to allow ugly content on their store or not, but they can&t act like Steam is just some giant bucket inside of which games just sit. Valve is a multi-billion-dollar business that inhales revenues from every paid title it sells.

Free expression on the web is an awesome thing, even if it seems to suck sometimes, but stores should be responsible for the items they stock on their shelves.

Designer Ken Wongapp Florence isn&t exactly a game. Or a comic. Ita little bit of both — a new experience in storytelling using a mobile device.

The app — or game, if you prefer — comes from the mind of Ken Wong, best known before Florencerelease as Monument Valleydesigner — another app which broke new ground in mobile gaming by creating a visually stunning world that ended up winning the title of Apple&sGame of the Year in 2014, as well an Apple Design Award.

Now Wong has won for his work again on his first venture post-Monument Valley with an Apple Design Award for Florence.

We sat down with the designer on the sidelines of AppleWorldwide Developer Conference in San Jose this week to talk about how Florence came to be, and what Wong has planned next.

Wong had left ustwo Games (Monument Valleypublisher) before its sequel, Monument Valley II, because he wanted to try something new.

&I kind of said what I wanted to. The best thing for Monument Valley would be to have other people take over and expression their vision for it,& he says.

Wong moved back to his home country, Australia, from London, to Melbourne, where therea thriving indie gaming scene, to launch his new company Mountains.

The team at Mountains is small — just a programmer, producer and artist in addition to Wong.

The company partnered with Annapurna, a film studio behind hits like &Her& and &Zero Dark Thirty,& that now runs its own games division. The studio backed Mountains on the Florence project, but also gave the team advice and input along the way.

As part of this arrangement, Annapurna shares in Florencerevenue. (Florence sells for $2.99.)

Unlike traditional games, you don&t play the &game& Florence with a goal of getting a high score or achieving goals of some kind.

Instead, you tap your way through the interactive story where a young woman, Florence, meets someone, falls in love and has a relationship. You live through it with her, dealing with everything from parental pressure over her single status, to then first dates and moving in together.

Music is a key part of the experience, and helps the game invoke an emotional response.

When the relationship ends, you&ve been invested in this story and characters, and probably will feel sad.

Thatthe point, says Wong.

&A lot of people think of games as things you can win — things that involve luck or skill.But…in video games — or, largely, the digital interactive space — thereso much that you can do,& he says.

&It seems like we&re surrounded by stories of love and romance and relationships…but it felt like that was a blind spot for mobile games. We wanted to tap into that and see how far we could take a romance game on mobile,& Wong explains.

Wong says he was inspired by stories from friends, as well as his own personal experience, when building Florence, as well as movies about relationships like &Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,& and &500 Days of Summer.&

Like those, Florence is also a portrait of a relationship thatboth light and dark, both joyful and painful.

&Itmy job to provide stimulating material. I just want to move people. And I think moving people in itself can be a goal. What they take out of it is really up to the individual,& he says.

Now that Florence is out there, on both iOS and Android, Wong says he hopes it will inspire other developers to take what the team introduced in terms of the appinterface design, and use that to tell their own stories.

As for Mountains, however, the team is now considering what stories they want to tell next. They&re not announcing the details of those discussions, but they have some ideas around telling other types of stories that aren&t represented today through mobile gaming.

We might not see those come to life for some time — it took Florence 15 months to go from idea to launch, and the next title will likely take just as long.

But Wong knows what kind of stories they probably won&t do, he says.

&There are so many other studios out there exploring your traditional power fantasies, like combat and fighting and such,& he says.

&I think where we can really contribute is telling stories that are less explored — human experiences that have to do with family or identity. I think thatwho we are.&