With all that is going on in Uganda concerning access to social media, many of you must think me odd to ask, what does the launch of Instagram TV mean for content creators in this country?

Every day, Ugandan brands, content creators and publishers, together with the world at large, have spent years investing in making countless viral videos every day. They have pivoted their production efforts towards high-quality, episodic video series that can be sold or licensed across many different video channels.

Just a few years ago, viral videos were once the holy grail of driving traffic volumes but today, they have mostly become a marketing tool, due to the changing consumption habits and tech platform dynamics.
Now, series and shows are being created and leveraged for better revenue and audience development opportunities on platforms like Amazon Prime, Facebook Watch, Netflix, Instagram TV and Youtube.

Why the shift from ‘snackable’, bite-size video content to higher demand for the in-depth?
The shift began over a year ago, when tech companies began investing in over-the-top (OTT) video products, like Facebook Watch, and when subscription video on-demand companies, like Netflix and Amazon, began investing in publisher content, according several publishing executives.

In the last year, we’ve seen a definite swing after the peak of the Facebook Live ‘watermelon explosion’ era.
I think content publishers across the board saw a decline in how many people were watching their videos, partly because of the changes made in the timeline algorithms for brand and media content published to get preference over any other content. All this indicates that (the viral video/content strategy) wasn’t a direction to keep pushing any further.

However value in ‘feed-based content’ informing audiences about the news of the day, for example, business news, has this format perfected on all their social channels.
At the same time, brands and publishers will need to invest in OTT in order to develop that much needed relationship with their audiences to be able to go deeper with the stories and content they want to cover.

Instagram TV provides this opportunity (low hanging fruit) especially if as a brand or publisher you have an already existing Instagram account. The platform keeps evolving, providing opportunities to consume content that is customized for mobile device.
We at WMC Africa will be soon launching our very own Instagram TV channel to share more in-depth content. Like our blog content, we shall have discussions on various topics.

Follow us on our Instagram account @wmcafrica to get updates on when content is published.