Empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs), recent advancements in VideoLLMs have driven progress in various video understanding tasks. These models encode video representations through pooling or query aggregation over a vast amount of visual tokens, making computational and memory costs affordable. Despite successfully providing an overall comprehension of video content, existing VideoLLMs still face challenges in achieving detailed understanding in videos due to overlooking local information in long-term videos. To tackle this challenge, we introduce LongVLM, a straightforward yet powerful VideoLLM for long video understanding, building upon the observation that long videos often consist of sequential key events, complex actions, and camera movements. Our approach proposes to decompose long videos into multiple short-term segments and encode local features for each local segment via a hierarchical token merging module. These features are concatenated in temporal order to maintain the storyline across sequential short-term segments. Additionally, we propose to integrate global semantics into each local feature to enhance context understanding. In this way, we encode video representations that incorporate both local and global information, enabling the LLM to generate comprehensive responses for long-term videos. Experimental results on the VideoChatGPT benchmark and zero-shot video question-answering datasets demonstrate the superior capabilities of our model over the previous state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative examples demonstrate that our model produces more precise responses for long videos understanding.