IGTV

» see instagram.com/tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

IGTV launched on 20 june 2018 at an instagram event in san francisco. kevin systrom was still at the company then, and he pitched it as vertical video for a phone-first audience, up to an hour long, in a separate app that sat next to instagram in your home screen. this was two years before tiktok reset what mobile video meant, and about eighteen months before instagram noticed. IGTV was instagram's answer to the question "why should long-form video have to be a landscape rectangle on a laptop", and that was a real question in 2018.

the app did not work as a standalone product. by january 2020 instagram removed the orange IGTV button from its own home screen because so few people were tapping it. total downloads of the standalone app hovered around seven million while instagram had more than a billion active users. the format itself got quietly folded back into instagram in october 2021 as plain "instagram video", and in february 2022 the company confirmed the standalone app would be pulled. it disappeared from the app stores in march 2022.

i had an instagram account through all of this. i do not remember ever downloading IGTV. it belongs to the set of platform-first features that were only visible if you were the kind of user who read tech announcements, and the number of accounts that fit that description was roughly the same as the seven million downloads. the rest of us used instagram, saw the tab, ignored it, and eventually noticed it was gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the pitch was interesting on paper. instagram had figured out squares and then stories. IGTV was the third format, and it stretched the runtime from sixty seconds to sixty minutes. the assumption was that creators who had built stories audiences would move some of their long content over, and that a vertical youtube would emerge with instagram's social graph pre-loaded.

it did not happen. creators kept posting long content on youtube because youtube paid them. instagram's own algorithm did not surface IGTV videos in the main feed with any weight, so the discovery loop that instagram usually gets from cross-promoting a new format never got started. IGTV was a cold-start problem instagram never solved.

~ how it died ~

tiktok landed globally in 2018 and 2019 with a completely different bet on short vertical video, and by 2020 instagram was building reels as an internal answer to it. once reels launched the company had two vertical video products, one that was working and one that was not. IGTV lost the internal competition. by october 2021 the long-form format was rolled into the main instagram feed as "instagram video", and the standalone app was on a countdown. the february 2022 announcement was more of a paperwork moment than a surprise.

~ what remains ~

the thing IGTV proved is that a second app is a very high bar. instagram is one of the few companies with the scale to force a second install, and even instagram could not do it. every "companion app" that meta and google have tried since then has met the same wall. IGTV lives on inside instagram as a video-tab pattern that has been renamed and rearranged at least three times, and probably will be again.

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