Instagram tests 90-minute horizontal Features videos to take on YouTube

What Instagram is testing

Instagram began testing a format called Features on Monday, 26 October 2026, letting creators publish horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes. The first phase is a small test with select creators in the United States, and some creators in Brazil are also taking part, according to Instagram spokesperson Megan Buckley. The format targets podcasters, comedians and other long-form creators who want to share full-length shows on the app. Features will appear in users' main feeds and on the Explore page, where full-length videos will also be recommended. Reels are being tested as a way in, with a link to the full-length video so that viewers who tap a podcast clip can keep watching or jump to the whole episode, Tessa Lyons, Instagram's vice president of product, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Why the shift now

Adam Mosseri has long been wary of long-form video on the platform, worried that longer clips could pull people away from sharing Reels, photos and carousels with friends, a behavior he considers central to the app. Mosseri now hopes the two formats will be "symbiotic", so that a podcast or comedy special published in full can also reach new viewers through its shorter clips. He also stressed that the team wants Instagram to stay about connecting with friends, not only entertainment. In an interview with the creators Colin and Samir, he put the company's thinking simply:

“We want to be the most culturally relevant platform, and to do that, we need to show up where people are.”

Monetization and the YouTube comparison

For now, creators on Instagram mostly earn through brand deals, Mosseri said in the Colin and Samir interview, with some paid by fans and a small performance-based program that Instagram does not plan to scale because it spends more than it earns back. Features will not share advertising revenue with creators for now, although Instagram has left open the option of changing that later. Only a few creators who have struck individual deals with Meta can make long-form content during the test, and Meta plans to help creators without advertiser relationships find brand partners. YouTube works differently: creators in its Partner Program receive 55% of the ad revenue their videos earn, and the platform said in 2025 that it had paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the four years before that. It is possible that Meta, which earns most of its revenue from advertising, will put ads in long-form videos too.

TV app and earlier attempts

Instagram's TV app launched first on Amazon Fire TV in the United States in December 2025 and has since expanded to Google TV and Samsung TVs, with an Apple TV app now being added. Features will be prioritized in that app, and the TV apps are gaining support for Stories posts and live streams. Instagram is also testing a "series" option that lets creators link several short videos together, along with clips that point to a long video and improvements to live video discovery. The company has tried this before: IGTV, a separate app for longer clips, launched in 2018 and was shut down in 2022. Mosseri said the new push would likely "take some time to get right", as the timeline below shows.