Instagram Adds Long-Form Video and TV Viewing in Push to Become Streaming Destination

Instagram is overhauling its video experience to support long-form content and TV viewing, positioning the platform as a centralized destination for both short clips and extended video — a direct challenge to YouTube’s dominance on the big screen. The changes were announced in 2026.

Tessa Lyons, vice president of product at Instagram, told WIRED the goal is to build the “best place for social entertainment.” The update includes expanded creator tools that allow Reels to be organized into episodic series, a feature called “Series” that is already available to some creators and is being tested for TV viewing. Instagram also plans to let users turn their smartphones into TV remotes and surface what friends have been watching through a Friends tab.

Lyons described the design challenge at the core of the update: short-form content tends to be vertical, while long-form content is typically horizontal. The company’s approach is to treat TV as the destination for long-form, horizontal content and mobile as the discovery layer. “TV becomes a great destination for watching long-form, horizontal content, and mobile becomes a great place for discovering that content,” Lyons said.

The move is also an attempt to learn from a previous misstep. Instagram’s earlier long-form video product, IGTV, launched in 2018 but failed to gain traction largely because it only supported vertical video. Meta discontinued the app a few years after launch.

The update also targets the current popularity of short podcast clips on social media, which creators use to drive visibility. Instagram’s stated aim is to connect those viral moments directly to full-length content — so a clip a user sees on their phone could lead them to stream the complete episode on their TV later that same day.