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📺 Instagram’s going after YouTube, too…

Instagram for TV’s interface.
Instagram, the app that trained a generation to lose interest after 1.5 seconds, would now like you to settle in for a 90-minute video. On Monday it started testing Features, horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, with tens of thousands of US creators. Same day, it put its Instagram for TV app on Apple TV, where Features will eventually live too. Long videos, big screens. Sounds a lot like YouTube. The details:
Features are aimed at podcasters, comedians, and vloggers. They post a clip as a Reel, it links to the full episode, and viewers never have to leave Instagram.
Right now anything over three minutes doesn't get pushed to new audiences, which is why creators post the teaser on Insta and the real thing on YouTube.
Instagram's cutting deals with early creators, but none of them are exclusive. Post it on YouTube too, keep your sponsor reads, and Instagram says it'll help find sponsors if you don't have any.
There'll be hurdles. YouTube pays, and pays well: creators keep 55% of the ad money, and plenty of them make a full-time living off it. Instagram hasn't said what it'll pay, so the offer right now is exposure. (Creators have heard that one before.) The audience is a question mark, too. Scrollers don't automatically become sit-down viewers because you made the videos longer. And this isn’t Instagram’s first swing. IGTV, its long-form video app from 2018, came and went by 2022, quietly.
The bigger picture: This is really about hours on the TV screen, and YouTube has more of them than anyone. Nielsen's latest Gauge had it at a record 15.8% of all US TV viewing in August, more than double Netflix's 7.7%. That gap is why Netflix has spent the past year poaching top creators and podcasters. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri points out that YouTube has stopped growing on phones and “all their growth is coming on TV.” Translation: the living room is where the growth is, so that's where Instagram wants to be, too.
Related: Oh, and keep an eye on Spotify. The Duplass Brothers just made 'The Long Long Night,' their six-episode indie series starring Mark Duplass and Barrett O'Brien, free on Spotify. Two episodes a week. Spotify says it's becoming a video destination alongside music and podcasts.