Instagram Bringing Vertical Video to TVs

The normalization of vertical video is almost complete. On Tuesday, Amazon announced that its Fire TV devices, including Fire TV Stick products and TVs with Fire TV with the operating system built-in, will be the first to get a standalone Instagram app from Meta, part of a pilot program that will likely eventually expand to other platforms.

The Instagram app for Fire TV will focus primarily on Reels, a short-form video product that, frankly, doesn’t feel like it belongs on a TV. Typically vertical videos will be letterboxed, with empty space on either side filled with video description details and information, including likes, shares, and comments. Unlike the standard Instagram app, the Instagram for TV version will display a row of “channels” on the home screen, with Reels grouped by different subjects, topics or trends. There will still be personalized recommendations based on what’s popular on your account and among your friends, and you can discover content and creators.

Meta claims that Reels is largely responsible for Instagram’s continued growth, with the app recently hitting three billion total users. The company also says it regularly hears from people who say they mirror their phone to their TV to watch Reels with friends, so the standalone TV app is an effort to streamline that process for people (even if the process isn’t actually that complicated).

At this point it’s quite clear that a lot of attention is paid to vertical video. TikTok reportedly has around 1.8 billion active users globally and offers this type of short-form video content created specifically for phones. With Google claiming that nearly two billion people watch YouTube Shorts, its format is vertically-aligned, which almost certainly benefits from the huge user base YouTube has. A recent survey conducted by Media.net found that 73% of people report watching short-form social videos multiple times per day.

But that experience is built for mobile. The same survey found that 81% of people watch those videos on their smartphones, and only 2% watch streamed content on their TVs. This checks that the social video viewing experience is designed to be easy to get in and out of. Open the app, watch some videos, pick it up later when you have some free moments. The idea of ​​turning on your TV and sitting down to watch a stream of 30-90 second long video and pressing up or down to navigate instead of swiping is not exactly a seamless viewing experience.