Yelp will soon be allowing video reviews on its app

Shaky smartphone videos are coming to Yelp. The popular business review site on Wednesday told Business Insider that the app will soon introduce a video component, allowing users to upload short clips in the same vein as Vine. Yelp’s product manager, Madhu Prabaker, said the new feature is meant to help reviewers better capture the ambiance of a restaurant or business the way a picture couldn’t. “It will be a reward for business that go to great lengths to achieve a certain ambiance,” Prabaker said.

Yelp is adding a new video feature to its app that will let users upload short clips in the same way that they would upload photos. Yelp’s mobile product manager, Madhu Prabaker, told Business Insider that the idea of the new feature is to help reviewers fully capture the atmosphere of a restaurant, store, or other small business, better than they could with photos alone. “It will be a reward for businesses that go to great lengths to achieve a certain ambiance, whether by having a certain lighting or the music at just the right level,” Prabaker says. Each video can be between 3 and 12 seconds long, and Yelp will start introducing the ability to upload videos to its “Elite users” in early June, before rolling the feature out to everyone else. Even if you can’t upload videos right away, you’ll start seeing them on mobile reviews in early June.