Instagram is trying something it has avoided for years. Long stories. Episodes. A living room screen instead of a phone in your hand. The company behind the world’s biggest short video feed is now betting that people want to sit back and binge, the way they do on Netflix, just in much smaller bites.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, confirmed this week that Instagram for TV is now available on Samsung Smart TVs in the United States, reaching devices from the 2020 model year onward. That brings the app to the vast majority of connected televisions across the country, sitting alongside its existing presence on Amazon Fire TV and Google TV.
This is not simply about putting a phone app on a bigger screen. Meta is testing a set of new features built specifically around watching together with other people in the room. These include themed channels organised by interest, things like comedy, sport or favourite creators, designed to make it easier for a group of people to find something everyone enjoys. Users on Google TV and Fire TV can already cast videos directly from their phone to the television, including clips they had saved earlier to watch later. Instagram is also bringing its Stories feature to television screens, letting people catch up with friends without everyone crowding around a single phone.
The most significant shift, though, is the move into horizontal video and longer storytelling. Instagram has spent more than a decade training both its creators and its audience to think in short, vertical clips designed for a phone held upright. Television does not work that way. Meta is now testing a dedicated home for horizontal video and encouraging creators to build stories that unfold over multiple episodes, complete with recurring characters and cliffhangers designed to bring viewers back for the next instalment.
This is where micro dramas come in. These are short, serialised stories, typically running between one and three minutes per episode, broken into instalments that end on a hook designed to make viewers tap through to the next one. The format has exploded in popularity over the past two years, first on Chinese apps and then on platforms including TikTok, which has launched its own micro drama app called PineDrama and signed content deals with production companies in the space.
See Also: WhatsApp usernames raise privacy and scam concerns
Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product, described television as the platform’s next frontier in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. She said Instagram has noticed creators already producing longer videos and sharing them elsewhere, and the company wants to give those creators an accessible way to tell more episodic stories directly on Instagram itself. She was careful to note that professional production houses already make a lot of micro drama content, and she expects that to continue. But she sees a real opportunity for ordinary creators, particularly those who built their following through short form videos, to move into longer storytelling using tools that are simple enough for them to manage on their own.
According to report, Instagram has also begun testing a Series tool that lets creators group individual videos, whether newly made or pulled from their existing library, into a structured, sequential collection. Instead of forcing a viewer to hunt across someone’s profile to find the next part of a story, the Series tool organises everything into clear seasons and episodes that audiences can follow in order. Instagram has started testing this same structure with media publishers as well as individual creators, suggesting the company sees a role for both amateur storytellers and established production companies inside the same feature.
The financial logic behind the push is significant. Instagram has pointed to estimates that the micro drama market in the United States alone is worth around $1.3 billion. In India, the wider micro drama segment had reached an annual run rate of $260 million by late last year, nearly doubling in just two months, according to figures from Redseer Strategy Consultants. Major Indian streaming names including JioHotstar, ZEE5 and Amazon’s MX Player have all launched their own dedicated micro drama products, while traditional film studios are reportedly weighing whether to enter the format too.
Instagram’s position in that wider ecosystem is somewhat different from its rivals. Rather than building a standalone destination app the way some competitors have, Instagram is increasingly functioning as the discovery layer where audiences first encounter micro dramas through their regular Reels feed, before some of them migrate to dedicated apps built purely for that kind of content. Industry observers describe this as Instagram acting like an acquisition funnel for the broader micro drama industry, introducing viewers to the format before other platforms capture them as committed subscribers.
Meta has been clear that all of this remains in early testing. The company said it is working closely with creators as it develops these new formats, and that it is still in the early stages of understanding what social video genuinely looks like when it moves from a phone screen to a television. Whether Instagram succeeds in building a meaningful television presence, or whether the experiment fades the way several earlier attempts by social platforms to crack the living room have, depends heavily on whether enough creators are willing to commit to the kind of longer, structured storytelling the format demands, rather than the quick, disposable clips that built Instagram’s audience in the first place.
About the Author
Marcel Chidozie is a tech analyst and writer covering foreign news, fintech, and emerging technologies at TechRegard. Based in Nigeria, He's passionate about translating complex tech developments into compelling, accessible stories for diverse audiences. His work focuses on how technology shapes innovation across Africa and globally.
