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 as its built-in operating system, will be the first to get a standalone Instagram app from Meta, part of a pilot program that will presumably eventually expand to other platforms.

The Instagram app for Fire TVs will focus primarily on Reels, the short-form video product that, frankly, does not seem like it belongs on TVs. The typically vertical videos will be letterboxed, with the dead 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 topics, themes, or trends. There will still be personalized recommendations based on your account and what is popular with your friends, and you can search for content and creators.

Meta claims that Reels is largely responsible for Instagram’s ongoing growth, with the app recently hitting three billion total users. The company also says that 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 attempt to streamline that process for people (even though the process isn’t really complicated as is).

It’s pretty obvious at this point that vertical video gets a lot of eyeballs. TikTok reportedly has about 1.8 billion active users globally and exclusively serves up this type of short-form video content made for phones. Google claims that about two billion people watch YouTube Shorts, its vertically-aligned take on the format, which almost certainly benefits from the massive userbase that YouTube proper has. A recent survey conducted by Media.net found that 73% of people report watching short-form social video multiple times per day.

But that experience is built for mobile. That same survey found that 81% of people watch those videos on their smartphones, and just 2% watched by beaming content to their TVs. That checks out given that the social video viewing experience is made for getting in and out easily. Open the app, watch a few videos, pick it up later when you have a couple free moments. The idea of firing up your TV and sitting down to watch a stream of 30-90 second-long videos and hitting up or down on your remote to navigate instead of swiping is just not really an intuitive viewing experience.