Starting today, Instagram is making a serious play for the living room. The Meta-owned platform announced that Instagram for TV is now available on Samsung Smart TVs across the U.S., covering 2020 model year devices and newer. Combined with its existing presence on Amazon Fire TV and Google TV, Instagram is now accessible across the majority of connected TV devices in the country.
But the Samsung expansion is only part of the story. Instagram is simultaneously testing a wave of new features designed to make the platform feel less like a phone app awkwardly projected onto a big screen and more like something actually built for it.
Chief among them: horizontal video. For years, Instagram has been a portrait-mode world, with vertical Reels dominating the feed. The new dedicated section for landscape content is a direct acknowledgment that TV watching demands a different orientation, and it signals where Instagram’s living room ambitions are actually headed.
Also new or in testing: the ability to cast Reels directly from your phone to your TV, Stories support within the TV app, and interest-based channels that surface content around comedy, sports, or specific creators, the kind of lean-back discovery experience that feels borrowed straight from the streaming playbook.
The more ambitious experiments are still on the horizon. Instagram says it is actively exploring longer-form creator content, episodic series that unfold across multiple episodes, and Live on TV. The company began reaching out to creators this week to start developing that episodic content, with Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s VP of product, telling The Hollywood Reporter that short-form creators are well-positioned to make the jump. “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,” she said.
That nod toward episodic content puts Instagram squarely in microdrama territory, a format that has exploded in popularity and is typically delivered in one-to-three-minute serialized episodes. TikTok has already moved aggressively here, launching its own microdrama vertical through PineDrama and signing a deal with Issa Rae’s production company HOORAE earlier this year. Instagram’s entry into the space suggests the format is graduating from niche trend to legitimate battleground.
For streaming executives, the timing is not exactly comforting. YouTube already surpassed Netflix and HBO Max in U.S. TV viewership in 2025, becoming the most-watched video provider on the television set. Netflix has responded by moving toward social media formats, striking deals to stream video podcasts from figures like Pete Davidson and Bill Simmons and introducing a vertical video Clips feed on mobile. The borders between social media and streaming are dissolving fast, and Instagram is accelerating that process.
Instagram for TV first launched on Amazon Fire TV in December 2025 before expanding to Google TV in February 2026. The Samsung rollout represents its most significant distribution leap yet, and the feature set arriving alongside it makes clear that Instagram is no longer treating TV as a secondary screen. It is treating it as the next one to conquer.
“I think what’s old is new again in that people love coming together around stories,” Lyons said. “And I think that giving creators more ways of going directly to their audiences to do that is going to be a great way of supporting creativity.”
Whether that creativity looks more like prestige TV or a six-episode Reel series is, apparently, something Instagram is very eager to find out.