Why Instagram wants to be on your TV now

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:02)
Earlier this week, on Monday, Instagram announced that it is expanding its TV ambitions. The company is testing long form episodic content, live programming, and all kinds of new viewing experiences. And all of it is specifically designed for your TV screen. For example, when you open the app, you will see channels organized around topics and creators that you already follow. Comedy, sports, specific people that you watch. You can cast reels directly from your phone to your TV, browse your saved content on the big screen, and now watch stories too, not just reels. The app is also testing a dedicated section for horizontal videos. Because as we know, the vertical phone content does not always translate well to a living room screen. Now, at first, this looks like another social media company trying to break into streaming. Instagram would not be the first, and it probably will not be the last. But if you zoom out, the announcement fits into a much larger, longer story.
If you remember, back in 2020, Instagram launched reels, quick videos as a direct response to TikTok. The format was limited to just 15 seconds, and the appeal was obvious, endless discovery and constant novelty. Since then though, Instagram has been moving in the opposite direction. What I mean is 15 seconds became 30, 30 became 60, and then 90 seconds. And then earlier this year, Instagram extended reels to 3 minutes. This was after creators complained that the format had become too restrictive. So this month, Meta began testing series, which is a feature that lets creators organize content into episodes. And now the company wants more of that content on television screens.
Now, the thing is, none of these decisions happened in isolation. If you look at them together, they point towards a platform that keeps giving creators more time. But this raises a surprisingly simple question. If short form video was supposed to be the future, why does Instagram keep making it longer? Remember IGTV? Instagram already tried this back in 2018 and killed it within 3 years. So what's different this time?
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host Snigdha Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 25th of June.
The creator pressure argument is the one that Instagram offers publicly. Every time the platform imposed a length limit, creators pushed back against it. In January this year, Instagram's head Adam Osirri announced that Reels would expand to three minutes, saying that creators had consistently told the platform that 90 seconds was too restrictive. But creator feedback is only a part of the answer. The other part is money, and it is a more complicated story.
When Reels launched in August 2020, it generated no revenue at all. By mid-2022, it had crossed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate, but it was simultaneously costing Meta more than $500 million every quarter. The reason was straightforward. Short videos were pulling users away from Instagram's main feed, where ads had always been more profitable.
On Meta's Q4 2022 earnings call, Zuckerberg put it quite plainly. The monetization efficiency of Reels, he said, was much less than the feed. The more Reels grew, the more Meta actually lost. Now, wait a second. Don't you think that's quite a remarkable thing for the chief executive of a company to say publicly about one of its fastest growing products?
Well, as it turns out, Zuckerberg was actually also signaling something. Meta was absorbing the loss deliberately, betting that it could close the gap over time.
The mechanism it bet on was AI.
Meta poured investment into recommendation systems, the algorithms that decide which Reels to show each user. The logic was that better recommendations would mean longer watch times and longer watch times would mean more ad impressions. As an analyst from Nuberger Berman told CNBC earlier this year, every signal that a user generates, what they watch, pause or skip, makes the recommendation engine sharper and that improvement shows up directly in Reels revenue. The bet paid off, but not in a way that most people assume. Individual Reel ads still generate less revenue per ad than Instagram's main feed. And that gap has not been fully closed. What changed instead was volume. As Reels consumed more and more of the time that users were spending on Instagram, accounting for nearly half of all the time spent on the app in the US in 2025, the sheer number of ad impressions began to outweigh the lower rate per ad. By the third quarter of 2025, Zuckerberg announced on Meta's earning call that Reels had crossed a $50 billion annual revenue run rate across Instagram and Facebook. To put that in context, YouTube's total advertising revenue for the same period would analyze to roughly $41 billion.