For most of the past decade Instagram’s answer to video that runs long has been to cut it into pieces. On Monday the company tried the opposite direction.
Instagram began testing a format called Features with a group of creators in the United States, allowing single horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes. The product is aimed at podcasters, comedians and others who publish talk-driven shows, and it has already been run in Brazil on a smaller scale. A clip in Reels, the short-video feed where Instagram puts most of its audience, can now carry a link to the full episode, and the longer videos will also be recommended on the Explore page.
“So many creators are producing longer videos, and they’re using clips of those videos to drive discovery on Reels and help build their audience,” Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
That sentence describes the business problem the format is meant to solve. Reels is where creators find viewers. It is not where they get paid much, because short clips carry little advertising and the revenue split on them is thin. A comedian with a two-hour special and a podcast with a weekly guest have had to send that audience to YouTube to watch the whole thing, and YouTube has kept the advertising attached to it.
The 90-minute limit is the part that matters commercially. It is a television number, not a social-media one. Instagram has been building toward television for two years: its TV app, which puts the feed on a big screen, expanded to Apple TV in the United States, and a format that runs as long as a talk show gives that app something to play. Viewing on a television changes the advertising arithmetic, because a viewer sitting through forty minutes of a podcast will accept more interruptions than someone scrolling a feed.
Instagram is not promising creators a share of that advertising yet. Variety reported that the initial test does not include revenue sharing, and that creators are expected to bring their own sponsorships into the format. Lyons said established creators can carry existing branded-content arrangements into the longer videos, and that the company sees an opportunity to help creators who do not yet have that business behind them. That is a description of a plan, not a contract.
The company has tried this before and failed. IGTV launched in 2018 as a home for vertical long-form video, with its own tab and its own app, and it never attracted either the audience or the creators the company expected. Instagram folded it in 2022 and put its resources behind Reels, which competed with TikTok and won a large share of viewing time. The lesson drawn inside the industry was that a separate destination cannot be built on top of a social graph; the video has to live where the audience already is.
Features is designed around that lesson. There is no new app and no new tab. The long video sits behind a clip the viewer was already watching, which is the same mechanism YouTube used when it turned short clips into a funnel for long ones, and the same one podcasters have used on TikTok to push full episodes to YouTube.
What has changed since 2018 is the supply of content. Video podcasts have become a substantial business, with studios building shows around them and streaming services buying rights to creator programming. Netflix and Disney have both moved into the category, largely to compete with YouTube, which has become the default place to watch a two-hour interview. Instagram’s argument is that it already owns the discovery layer for that content and should not hand the viewing to a competitor.
The obstacles are practical. Ninety-minute uploads require moderation systems that short clips never needed, and copyright review at that length is a different problem from scanning a fifteen-second video. Podcasters who have spent years building a YouTube library have little reason to re-upload it without a revenue share, and audiences trained to watch long interviews on a television through a YouTube app may not switch because the clip they saw was on Instagram.
Then there is the question of what Instagram is willing to spend. Reels was promoted with payments to creators and aggressive recommendation of their work, and it took years to turn into a business. A long-form format competes for the same engineering attention and the same advertising inventory, and the company has not said how much it will invest or how success would be measured.
The test is small by design: a group of creators in one country, no revenue split, no date for a wider release. That is how Instagram has launched most things since Reels, and it leaves the company free to retreat without a public reversal if the format does not find an audience.
What the company is really testing is whether a phone app can sell television time. Instagram has the audience, the recommendation system, and now a screen in the living room. It does not yet have the advertising product that makes a 90-minute video worth more to a creator than the same show on YouTube, and until it does, Features will be a place where clips lead somewhere rather than a place where the money is.
