Why instagram video are 15 second long? is there any reason?

Vine was started by Twitter a few months before Instagrams service and they only allow six second videos. I assume the mentality is “We do the same, but ours are longer.”.

If you have to ask that then you don’t get it…

I agree that they wanted to compete with vine, but one-up them; yet they still have “Insta” in their name – implying instant or momentary – so they adhered to that concept. If one wants to post longer videos, there are plenty of other options out there.

I run a web video related free thing that only a few people can use. Video is a nightmare. It is CPU intensive. If there is 5 concurrent users trying to encode video at the same time my 40$ a month server shits all over itself. And that server is a i3 with 8Gigs of RAM. Probably better than what is in your computer.

I can’t even fathom how youtube scaled.

@johnpowell Running massively parallel Linux servers with thousands of cores along with obscenely large RAID arrays makes things easier. That sort of architecture is scalable as hell too, so you can start with just 2 CPUs and 2 drives then work your way up as finances allow.

@johnpowell Yes, I assumed it was a tech issue. I got to play with Google glass last weekend and their videos are very short too.

@johnpowell YouTube scales by not doing things it doesn’t need to. At most a video needs to be encoded at upload and then into separate files for different resolutions. After that it’s just serving streams- a matter of network bandwidth, not CPU. If you have the storage and network bandwidth to stream 10,000 videos concurrently, you might have enough cycles to encode 100 videos left over :)
Also, your $40 a month server might be better than my (old) computer, but I had the use of the whole thing. If you are getting dedicated hosting on a machine like that for $40 a month, then I’d like to know where! I feel sure you’re on either shared hosting or (hopefully) a VPS.