FRESH CLIPPINGS
Instagram Wants to be TV
Instagram announced that it is testing horizontal video and long-form episodic storytelling on Instagram for TV, its connected TV feature that is now expanding to Samsung devices after previously being limited to Amazon Fire and Google TV products.
Instagram’s VP of product Tessa Lyons called television the next frontier for the app, and it doesn’t mean it is reinventing itself. It is Instagram following its creators, who have already been using the platform to promote extended content they were sharing elsewhere. So in essence, it’s the platform catching up to behavior that was already happening as creators expand.
Jen Topping flagged something that ties all of this together. Meta is running an annual ad revenue rate of $50 billion on Reels alone, more than every company except Disney made on video advertising last year, and yes, that includes YouTube. The push into connected TV opens up a new surface for that advertising machine, and for produc…
