Instagram for TV to begin screening old-school episodes

Instagram is offering new storytelling tools for content creators to attract more viewers to Instagram for TV.

As of Monday, the platform will be testing horizontal video on Instagram for TV, their feature that allows viewers to watch social videos on the big screen in their living room.

Coming soon after that, Meta, who owns the app, will also be experimenting with longer-form storytelling and episodic series with creators.

The changes are timed to the launch of Instagram for TV on Samsung TV devices next week.

Until now, Instagram for TV was only available on Amazon Fire and Google TV products.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Instagram Vice President of product Tessa Lyons said television is “the next frontier".

She added, “Ultimately Instagram is all about connecting people around creativity. We’re all about helping creators find their audiences and we’re constantly evolving how we do that in order to meet [their] needs.

“And I really think that TV is in so many ways the next frontier of that for us.”

Also coming on Monday is the ability for users to be able to watch “Stories” (limited-time posts that appear on the top of Instagram feeds) on their television sets.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Instagram (@instagram)

Instagram began to realise that creators were already using the app to publicise more extended videos that they were sharing elsewhere. Lyons noted the increasingly popularity of microdramas and believes its creators can move into the format, where storytelling is broken up into one to three-minute serialized episodes.

“Today a lot of them [microdramas] are produced by production houses and that’s cool and there’s going to be a role for that,” Lyons said.

“But we also think there’s an incredibly compelling opportunity for creators themselves to create in this format. And for a lot of the shortform content creators who are Instagram-native, it’s a very accessible way to get into telling longer and more episodic stories.”

Instagram says it is giving its creators the ability to try their hand at some traditional storytelling formats. “I think what’s old is new again in that people love coming together around stories,” Lyons said. “And I think that giving creators more ways of going directly to their audiences to do that is going to be a great way of supporting creativity.”

Top image: Instagram

Keep on top of the most important media, marketing, and agency news each day with the Mediaweek Morning Report – delivered for free every morning to your inbox.