The expansion
Instagram for TV is now available on Samsung Smart TVs in the US, covering 2020 model year TVs and newer. The app first launched on Amazon Fire TV devices in December 2025, then expanded to Google TV in February 2026, and with Samsung now included, the app reaches the three largest connected TV platforms in the US market.
The Samsung rollout is the distribution story. The product story is what Instagram is testing on top of it: channels organized around interests, casting Reels and Stories from your phone, and more to make discovering and sharing easier. More significantly, Instagram is exploring new formats, like episodic series and Live on TV, which it aims to roll out soon.
This is not simply mirroring the mobile app to a bigger screen. Instagram is building for a different behaviour: watching together, passing the remote, and swapping recommendations in real time, focused on making it easier for people to discover videos together, pick up where they left off, and share the experience with others in the room.
What's actually changing for creators and brands
Instagram is testing a dedicated home for horizontal videos, giving creators more ways to reach audiences and making it easier to enjoy content designed for the TV screen. For an app that spent years conditioning creators to shoot vertical, that is not a minor shift.
Instagram is exploring longer-form creator content that enables creators to tell deeper stories, episodic series that unfold across multiple episodes, and Live on TV, which brings live creator experiences to the big screen and creates new opportunities for people to watch and participate together in real time.
The algorithm now rewards single-take content on mobile. On TV, Instagram is testing the opposite: structured, serialised, horizontal formats designed for lean-back viewing rather than thumb-scroll discovery.
Casting is available on Google TV and Fire TV, including videos from your Saved tab, making it easier to bring your favorite finds to the group. That matters because it changes the intent. The phone becomes the curation device, the TV becomes the presentation layer, and the content that gets cast is the content someone actively chose to share with the room.
Stories from friends and creators are now watchable on TV, turning what was designed as ephemeral, personal mobile content into something viewed collectively in a living room.
Watching on TV is different from watching on a phone.
Instagram announcement, June 2026The production problem nobody's solved yet
Most creator content is shot and optimised for a phone held vertically at arm's length. On a phone, the user is active and constantly scrolling, but on a TV, the user is lean-back and passive.
A TV screen is a fundamentally different viewing context: larger format, lean-back, likely watched with others, and captions, opening frames, and production quality all need to be considered with that environment in mind.
Horizontal video for TV is not just vertical video rotated. The framing is different, the pacing is different, and the assumption of how long someone will stick with a piece of content is different. CTV ads run full-screen in a lean-back, often co-viewed environment, unskippable, with completion rates near 96%, which is a fundamentally different attention contract than feed-based mobile video.
Instagram has not yet published creator guidance on how to produce for the TV app, what aspect ratios to prioritise, or whether the content that performs on Stories translates to a Samsung screen. That gap will close, but right now brands commissioning creator content for Instagram need to decide whether to brief for mobile, TV, or both, and the platform has not made that decision simple.
The advertising play
Advertiser intent to increase spending on connected TV is among the strongest of any channel, with net intent at 82 percent according to industry surveys, compared with 56 percent for paid social, and bringing Instagram's ad-supported Reels to television screens gives Meta access to a new pool of advertising budgets that have traditionally gone to streaming services and broadcast networks.
U.S. CTV ad spending should hit roughly $38 billion in 2026, and CTV upfront commitments are set to pass primetime linear for the first time in 2026, $17.73 billion against $16.98 billion. That is the money Instagram is chasing.
The opportunity is clear. The execution risk is also clear: if Instagram serves mobile-optimised vertical ads into a horizontal TV viewing session, or interrupts lean-back co-viewing with the same direct-response creative that works in feed, the format will feel intrusive rather than native. Streaming ads can still feel interruptive to the paid experience and less effective, and Deloitte's spring 2025 Digital Media Trends research found that surveyed Gen Z and millennials say social media ads influence their purchases more than ads on streaming.
Instagram has not yet detailed how ads will work in the TV app, what targeting will be available, or whether brands will be able to buy TV inventory separately from mobile. Until those mechanics are public, this is a distribution play with an advertising bet attached, not a finished ad product.
What YouTube already proved
YouTube took 12.4% of all U.S. TV viewing in April 2025, the largest share of any media company Nielsen measures. That is the territory Instagram is now chasing.
YouTube succeeded on TV because it had a decade of horizontal creator content, a working recommendation engine for long-form video, and an advertising model built for lean-back viewing. Instagram has vertical Reels, an algorithm tuned for mobile, and no established creator behaviour around horizontal episodic content yet. The gap is real.
Instagram is now coming for streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video as it strives to capture eyes in the living room in addition to everywhere else. The ambition is clear. Whether Instagram can convince creators to produce differently, and audiences to watch differently, is the bet.
What social marketers should do now
First, understand that Instagram is testing two separate content environments. Mobile is still feed-first, vertical, and optimised for quick discovery. TV is becoming channel-based, horizontal-friendly, and built for longer sessions. Briefing creators as if those environments are identical will produce content that underperforms in both.
Second, if your brand is already producing horizontal video for YouTube or paid media, test casting it to Instagram TV via the Saved tab. Casting includes videos from your Saved tab, which means any brand account can save its own content and push it to TV without needing the TV app to algorithmically discover it first. That is a manual distribution path worth testing before the TV feed becomes crowded.
Third, watch for Instagram's creator guidance on horizontal formats and episodic series. When that drops, the brands that move first will have an edge while the TV app is still in its discovery-friendly early phase, before the algorithm learns what performs and before the feed becomes saturated.
Fourth, if you are running creator partnerships, add a question to the brief: can this work on a TV screen, or is it mobile-only? That clarity will save time and money later when Instagram inevitably pushes TV reach harder.
The bigger shift
What is considered TV has moved beyond cable or streaming programming and has creeped into short form and social content as well, and 41% of consumers say viewing both social media videos and streaming services count as "watching TV," according to data from Deloitte.
Instagram is not just building a TV app. It is betting that the line between "social video" and "television" is now blurry enough that the same platform can own both, and that creators can produce for both without needing separate infrastructure.
If that works, Instagram becomes the first platform to successfully straddle phone-first scrolling and TV-first lean-back viewing with the same content library. If it doesn't, Instagram will have a TV app that nobody opens because the content was never designed for it.
The Samsung launch is the easy part. Making horizontal episodic creator content feel native on Instagram is the hard part, and Instagram has not solved that yet.