Instagram Video vs. Vine: Which App is Better?

By Daniel Distant, Christian Post Reporter Friday, June 21, 2013

Instagram videos was released Thursday, giving the app's users the ability to shoot 15-second video clips instead of just pictures. The new app is competing with Vine, a year-old app that allows their users to shoot 6-second long clips with automatic looping. Instagram's much more feature-full app could spell the end for Vine, but others disagree.

The main differences between Instagram Video and Vine are immediately apparent once they're downloaded: InstaVideo, as it's been shortened to, gives longer clips, the ability to delete clips, various filters to color their videos, and camera stabilization options. It also boasts a 130 million-user base, since it functions as an option of Instagram, instead of a separate app.

Vine, on the other hand, gives users shorter clips, but with a mesmerizing looping quality that Instagram lacks. It also has their own stars like actor Simon Rex, Lecrae, Harley Morenstein of Epic MealTime, and even regular folk like Dalaun Richardson and Eric Dunn. The app's total user base is only 13 million, though- great numbers for an offshoot of Twitter, but no comparison to Facebook-owned Instagram.

Vine videos can also be embedded, while InstaVideos cannot. While the Vine community may have stimulated its own quirky artistry and short comedy skits, Instagram has more users, which means more advertisers and celebrities reaching a wider base.

So which one is better?

"[Instagram Video is] a completely different technology," actor and filmmaker Adam Goldberg, who has a wide fanbase on Vine, told CNET. "That Vine aesthetic is not possible, unless they decide to make [InstaVids] more touch-sensitive … I don't know why they even bothered to have the feature to keep your finger pressed down on the screen, because it doesn't have that stop action quality that lets you create weird Lynchian dreamscapes."

Indeed, users like Lance Ulanoff of Mashable have tried stop motion videos on Instagram and they haven't come out quite as good as those on Vine. But will that stop the inevitable surge for Instagram, which has new features like the ability to choose your cover photo for each video? Probably not.

"Video with Instagram … is going to hurt Vine," Ulanoff wrote. "This is a numbers game. Instagram's installed- and user-base is vastly larger than Vine's. 130 million people already have it installed and they will easily update." They also avoided making early mistakes of Vine by having front-camera capability and having Android onboard- Vine for Android was released only earlier this month.

Some popular Vine users have already jumped ship, now using their existing accounts only to promote themselves on Instagram or film a farewell video. Still, a core base could remain for the 6-second video app, as Instagram Video gets inevitably more cluttered.