Instagram has been rumoured to be getting into long-form video for a while – and yesterday the company made those plans official with the reveal of IGTV, its new standalone video app geared toward web creators, and youtube sensations. IG co-founder Kevin System said that “the hour-long limit is only for the launch of the app”, since the company plans to eventually let people upload video content without restraint.

IGTV is all about the 1080×1920 specs of vertical videos, and although it has its own app (in case you didn’t know), you can get the full experience within the main Instagram application. Inside the IG interface, you can now see an icon that takes you into the full vertical video experience – again, despite the fact Instagram developed a dedicated IGTV app for videos, anyone who doesn’t want to download it can still watch them from the main Instagram app — through a button at the top of the app allowing the end-consumer to access IGTV content. This basically means you can use the IGTV service without either alienating an IG-centric audience or being alienated yourself. Videos can be accessed from your profile too via a button next to Stories Highlights.

There are some obvious ways IGTV could try to make this work. The most likely is that Instagram will put mid-roll or pre-roll video ads inside these long-form videos and split the revenue with creators, the same strategy it’s using for Facebook’s new video section, Watch. It could also roll out a subscription offering, something it recently started to test on Facebook, or it could even pay creators outright for some of their work. (Facebook has paid publishers directly before, but has also made clear the long-term plan is a revenue split, not licensing deals.)

If Instagram’s trying to take a chunk out of YouTube’s near-monopoly on video, it’s starting from a strong place. Instagram has a dedicated audience, quite a few of them Millennials, of 1 billion monthly active users — A recent Pew study found the number of Gen Y who used Instagram was almost as high as those who used YouTube (72 and 85 percent, respectively). The same study found that 95 percent of them have access to a smartphone, and 45 percent are online “almost constantly,”!