*Instagram wants more of its content playing in living rooms.
The Meta-owned platform is expanding Instagram for TV to Samsung devices, giving more users a way to watch Instagram videos on a larger screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The feature had previously been available through Amazon Fire TV and Google TV.
The Samsung rollout comes as Instagram tests horizontal video for TV viewing. The company is also adding support for Stories on television and testing a feature that lets users cast Reels from their phones to a TV.
Instagram is not stopping at bigger screens. The app is exploring longer creator videos, episodic series and live programming designed for television-style viewing.
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Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product, told The Hollywood Reporter that TV has become a key area of interest for the platform.
“Ultimately Instagram is all about connecting people around creativity,” Lyons said. “We’re all about helping creators find their audiences and we’re constantly evolving how we do that in order to meet [their] needs.”
She added, “I really think that TV is in so many ways the next frontier of that for us.”
The move also reflects how creator content is changing. Many creators already use Instagram to promote longer projects hosted elsewhere. Instagram now wants some of that storytelling to happen directly on its own platform.
“We also think there’s an incredibly compelling opportunity for creators themselves to create in this format,” Lyons said. “For a lot of the shortform content creators who are Instagram-native, it’s a very accessible way to get into telling longer and more episodic stories.”
Instagram’s TV push comes as the fight for viewer attention continues to blur the line between social media, streaming and traditional television.
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