Video wars: Instagram takes on Vine

The battle lines are drawn for the biggest fight since the Rumble in the Jungle. That is of course if Muhammad Ali wore a beanie and was tweeting time-lapse videos of decorating a muffin.

Three weekends ago, the six-second clip-in-a-loop sharing app, Vine, was given a major thorn in its side: Instagram, the behemoth of photo sharing apps, launched its own video-sharing service.

Instagram allows a whole 15 seconds of video to be shared compared with Vine’s six — and it also has various filters (similar to the ones that make your hasty snap outside the Houses of Parliament more photogenic) that you can add to improve the look of your clips. The number of videos shared by influential users on Vine dropped straight away and more than five million videos were shared with Instagram on the first day alone.

Matt McGee, editor-in-chief of Marketing Land, a news site covering social media, says Instagram’s video length is a calculated move. “That’s a common length for TV commercials and Instagram would probably like content like that from major brands on its service.”

Licking its wounds and with the Rocky theme tune presumably on loop in the office, Vine has come back swinging by introducing a host of new features last week to try to woo back users.

Better camera features (including a new grid, autofocus and ghosting tool — which is really useful and lets you see the last frame superimposed as you shoot), the introduction of channels to categorise videos, being able to repost other people’s videos and the ability to protect posts have been rolled out.

McGee says the camera tools Vine has added are good, and re-posting (or re-vining) could be either a great way to discover new users or just become a nuisance as you see videos in your stream from people you don’t know or care about.

However, if you want something a bit more “intimate”, there are other video-sharing apps and networks out there. Vilynx is a brand new app that is still in Beta. It takes videos and creates a short clip, the size of a picture file, which you can share on other social networks. Then people can choose if they want to watch the whole video from the clip.

Juan Carlos Riveiro, co-founder and CEO of Vilynx, says: “Using Vilynx is like sharing a short video that is indexing the original long video within it. This is the future for sharing any online video independent of their length.” The service on offer is different from Vine and Instagram but it’s still microvideos.

“Vine and Instagram are great for short videos but there are more online videos than just short videos, and for those I believe Vilynx is the right solution,” adds Riveiro. “We believe this is going to be the standard for all online videos.”