Instagram Is a Streaming Service Now

“Our belief here is that entertainment and creativity are not limited to a three-minute video,” Tessa Lyons, vice president of product at Instagram, tells WIRED. She wants to build the “best place for social entertainment” with this overhaul of Instagram video. The social media platform may soon feel like a streaming service, as more viewers watch longer videos on their big screen.

Instagram is also expanding its creator tools for turning Reels into episodic content. “We want to be able to say, ‘Wow, Reece loved episode 3. So, as soon as episode 4 drops, we've got to make sure to show it to him,’” Lyons says. This Reels feature, called “Series,” is already available for some creators in the app, and it's being tested for TV viewing as well.

Instagram is focused on the experience of watching videos on your TV. It's hunting for ways to make that TV experience feel social, like showing your connections what you’ve been watching via the Friends tab. The company also plans to turn your smartphone into a TV remote.

Lyons sees the video-focused update as avoiding one of IGTV’s core mistakes—IGTV was the company’s previous attempt at more expansive content. In that instance, many viewers desperately wanted to flip the screen. IGTV failed to connect with users, in part, because it only allowed vertical videos. Meta discontinued the app a few years after its 2018 launch.

While Instagram’s latest changes challenge YouTube’s TV dominance, they also try to leverage its current strength as a platform for clips. Bite-sized clips, often of two people sitting behind podcast microphones, feel inescapable on social media right now, with many creators using them to boost visibility. Even WIRED’s own podcast now records videos for social media clipping.

Instagram is streamlining a viewer’s potential fandom journey. Rather than viral clips and long-form content existing on different platforms, Instagram is positioning itself as a centralized experience where I can stumble on Myrick’s health care rant in the morning and then open the app on my TV later that night and get a nudge to stream the full podcast episode.

“What we're seeing right now is that a lot of great short-form content is vertical, and a lot of great long-form content is horizontal, and we have the design challenge of figuring out how to make that all work cohesively in one product,” Lyons says. “TV becomes a great destination for watching long-form, horizontal content, and mobile becomes a great place for discovering that content.”