Instagram Takes on YouTube With Long-Form Videos. Again

Instagram is “inspired” by another app once again. It’s now testing Features, a new format for horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long. For now, it’s limited to a small group of creators. The featureaimed squarely at the podcasters, vloggers, and interviewers who currently treat YouTube as home base.

[Related Reading: The pros and cons of being a YouTube photographer]

According to The Hollywood Reporter, testing started with creators in Brazil, now expanding to a small group in the US. Instagram is trying out several length limits. 90 minutes is the top one, so don’t treat that as a final spec just yet. In a 6 and a half-minute-long video, Mosseri himself sat down with Instagram’s VP of Product, Tessa Lyons, to talk about the feature.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

He opens with something close to a confession: “For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram, as Tessa here knows very well. But we are actually going to lean in for a bunch of different reasons.”

“Historically, one of my concerns has been how do we make sure that we keep Instagram not just about entertainment, but about connecting with friends?” Mosseri says. “So the thing that the team has been working on that we’re excited to share with you is trying to make it so that short form and long form video can be symbiotic.”

Lyons, who worked with Mosseri on launching Reels, frames the move around how creators already work. “We also see that so many creators are producing longer videos and they’re using clips of those videos to drive discovery on reels and help build their audience,” she says. In other words, a lot of what you see as a reel is a trailer for a video that lives somewhere else, usually on YouTube. Instagram would like that “somewhere else” to be Instagram. They’ll have to actually stop pushing only short-form content for that, though.

Alongside Features, Mosseri and Lyons announced Series. This is a multi-episode format rolling out to some creators in the US, India, and Mexico.

People commenting on this video are wondering the same thing you are probably wondering right now. Why post an unpaid, long video on Instagram if they can just post it on YouTube and monetize it? I wonder this, too, and it looks like Mosseri still doesn’t have the answer to that.

Déjà Vu

If you’re getting déjà vu, you’re not alone. Instagram has a long and well-documented habit of looking at what other apps do well and building its own version.

Stories arrived in 2016 as a near-carbon copy of Snapchat’s signature format. Then-CEO Kevin Systrom openly admitted that Snapchat deserved the credit. Reels showed up in 2020, right as TikTok was dominating short-form video (and facing a possible US ban). Threads launched in 2023 as Meta’s answer to Twitter (now X), when plenty of people were looking for the exit. Even Instagram’s video editing app Edits, appeared in 2025 as an alternative to CapCut. Finally, a more recent Instants feature is clearly another Snapchat clone.

[Related Reading: 3 Social Media Alternatives That Feel Healthier Than Instagram]

And now it’s YouTube’s turn – again. Instagram already went after YouTube once with IGTV, and Features is round two.

To be fair, copying borrowing has sometimes been a great strategy for Instagram. Stories and Reels both worked, arguably better on Instagram than anyone expected. The question is whether long-form video belongs on a platform built around scrolling, sharing, and moving on. And also, how and if the creators will get compensation for their effort.

For now,Features seems to fix the obvious mistakes the company made with IGTV. It’s horizontal, it lives inside the main app instead of a separate one, and it plugs straight into Reels, the one video format Instagram has gotten right. The rollout is also much slower, which suggests Instagram learned something from launching IGTV with a big splash and watching it fizzle.

Now, I want to hear from you. I’m not a video creator, but I even post photos elsewhere rather than sharing them on Instagram. What about you? Would you post your full tutorials or behind-the-scenes videos on Instagram, or is YouTube still the place for the long stuff? Let me know in the comments.

[via PetaPixel]

---