Instagram might start supporting YouTube-like long-form videos

Instagram has spent years perfecting the quick scroll, the endless parade of Reels that keeps you tapping through content at a pace that would make your attention span weep. But that whole approach might be about to change.

In an interview with Semafor, Instagram head Adam Mosseri dropped what might be the most significant hint about the platform’s future direction. He admitted that the company might need to embrace long-form video, a market Instagram has deliberately stayed out of until now.

A focus on "premium content"

“It might turn out that maybe we’ll need premium content to work,” Mosseri said. “It might be that we need longform video. And then if we need long-form video, what does that mean for us? Because that’s literally been a market we’ve explicitly decided not to enter.”

That’s not a small thing to say. Instagram has built its entire identity around quick hits of content. The idea that it could pivot toward something resembling what YouTube does on your television is pretty wild to consider.

Speaking of televisions, Instagram is rolling out a new app for Amazon Fire smart TVs. Mosseri was refreshingly honest about not really knowing how people will actually use it. Maybe folks will just passively watch Reels, or perhaps they’ll hand the remote around to share stuff with whoever’s in the room

“We’re going to learn a lot,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll get a bunch of things wrong, but we’re gonna iterate quickly.”

The Instagram boss also had some thoughts on TikTok. He acknowledged that the US government’s pressure on TikTok to sell its American operations has slowed down the competition. While he gave TikTok credit for being better at surfacing new content to users, Mosseri suggested the app is becoming “too complicated” for Western audiences, comparing it to Chinese super apps that haven’t really caught on elsewhere.

ALSO READ: How to watch Instagram Reels on your TV

Looking further ahead, Mosseri talked about letting users shape their feeds in ways that feel “fundamentally different” from what exists now. He’s thinking two to four years out for those changes. And in a decade? He imagines smart glasses will have replaced phones entirely, which raises interesting questions for a platform that’s all about visuals.