Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram is pushing deeper into video with new products to help it compete more aggressively with TikTok and Google’s YouTube, and lay the foundation for its big swing in television.
The new products include Features, which are horizontal videos of as long as 90 minutes, and Series, designed for episodic, short-form microdramas. The company is also rebooting Instagram Live, which has been around for a decade, to make the streaming feature more ubiquitous and discoverable across the app, even to non-followers, in the Reels tab.
“Our goal is really to be the best place for social entertainment,” said Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product overseeing the video expansion under Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. “To do that well, we need to broaden the way that we enable people to tell stories through video and enable audiences to discover them.” A huge part of that is TV, she added, where people are spending more time streaming videos — especially creator-led content.
The shift comes as Instagram is seeing all-time highs in engagement driven mainly by video, Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said when the company reported third-quarter earnings last week. At the same time, the platform, which first rose to prominence as a photo-sharing app, faces intensifying competition with TikTok and YouTube and has been somewhat slower in developing a more entertainment-focused strategy.
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TikTok has already helped popularize microdramas, short-form soap operas for smartphones that took off in China and are gaining traction across the West, while YouTube recently introduced “Shorts series” to help creators organize their work into episodes and seasons. YouTube has been investing for close to a decade in its ‘living room’ strategy aimed at getting YouTube videos onto every screen in the home, making the video giant all but synonymous with modern-day TV.
Lyons acknowledged “we are in a very competitive market” but said Instagram has a unique advantage because it was built more on social connections and the premise of sharing with friends, a key value-add for creators eager to grow and nurture relationships with their fanbases.
“Creators don’t just want to put content out in the world,” she said. “They want to feel like they’re building a community around that content that’s deeply engaged with them.”
The success of Instagram Reels has also set up the platform to excel in other video formats, Lyons added, noting that people reshare those short, vertical video clips in direct messages 4.5 billion times a day.
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But Reels has a key limitation: Those over three minutes long are not recommended to new audiences, so comedians, podcasters, video bloggers and others have had to drive viewers off Instagram to keep them watching and engaging with content. Features are aimed at solving that problem by keeping users on-platform and enabling creators to experiment more freely with the length of their videos on both mobile and TV. Beginning Monday, a beta version will be available to tens of thousands of creators in the US.
Series, the medium tailored to booming short-form dramas, is in testing with a smaller subset of creators in the US, Mexico and India. Instagram’s surfacing of livestreams in recommendations and Reels is also in testing, set to launch in Indonesia and Brazil by the end of this year. Within the app, all of these formats will eventually be shown alongside Reels.
Instagram has been pursuing TV as a big swing in the US since last year, when it unveiled its first dedicated TV app allowing users to watch Reels on a larger screen. Since beginning as a test on Amazon.com Inc.’s Fire TV platform in December, those efforts have expanded to Samsung and Google TV. Instagram for TV launches Monday on Apple TV in the US, eventually moving beyond Reels alone to include the newly announced video formats, and soon, viewers will also be able to use their phones as remotes. Still, Lyons cautioned, “the TV bet is really early” and will be a multi year journey.
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“We are not at a stage right now where we’re trying to grow the TV bet — we’re really trying to figure out what’s working for audiences on TV — but we do think that that’s going to be a key part of the next few years of Instagram,” including outside the US in the near future, she said.
“If behavior [and] the consumption of these platforms is moving to TV,” Mosseri said last year in an interview with Bloomberg, “then we need to move to TV, too.”