Instagram is rapidly accelerating its transformation into a streaming media. The platform, which now boasts three billion monthly users, is exploring the creation of an application dedicated to connected television. The objective is to extend video consumption beyond mobile and establish itself on the big screen, the ultimate space still dominated by YouTube.
Adam Mosseri, director of Instagram, confirmed during the Bloomberg Screentime Conference that the company was working on this project: “If uses are migrating to television, then we have to go there too. » He also recognizes that the platform should have taken an interest in it sooner. This decision reflects the desire to adapt Reels, its flagship short video format, to a collective experience and no longer just an individual one.
Behind this product evolution, it is the very nature of the social network that is changing. How much content shared by loved ones still appears in feeds? If Meta does not publish any figures on this subject, the available data indicates that a very large majority of the publications now visible come from the algorithmic feed, a mixture of videos generated, recycled or simply recommended. The social model based on the connection between individuals has given way to a model of continuous distribution, where the user consumes content from unknown accounts or to which they are not subscribed.
This shift towards algorithmic “super-television” is not trivial. It closes a fifteen-year cycle where social platforms presented themselves as connection tools. From now on, Meta’s objective is to occupy as much screen time as possible, integrating all consumption temporalities: scrolling on mobile, viewing on tablet, projection on television. The feed becomes a flow, and the user a viewer.
At the same time, Instagram is trying to improve its image among parents and regulators. The company has introduced a new default setting for teen accounts, limiting young users’ exposure to content equivalent to a “PG-13” rating, modeled on American cinema. “PG” and “R” versions are also planned, but require parental validation. This segmentation of the web by age, based on authentication mechanisms that are still fragile and easily circumvented, is more of an exercise in compliance and communication than a real strategy for the protection of minors. It comes as Meta faces a series of legal actions, including one filed by the New York City government, which accuses the group of knowingly designing addictive products for children and adolescents.
An American bill intends to impose on platforms an obligation to protect minors comparable to that which formerly governed terrestrial television.
Video streams generated by platforms or AI, such as OpenAI with Sora or Meta with Vibes, erase any distinction between production, distribution and consumption. The economy of attention here reaches a never-before-reached level, that of a media where the algorithm replaces programming and where regulation attempts to replay the codes of a vanished world.
Created in 2010 and acquired by Meta in 2012, Instagram has gradually detached itself from its photographic DNA to become a platform focused on video. Its most popular features, Stories, Reels and private messaging, now concentrate most of the traffic. The application has more than three billion monthly active users and remains, with WhatsApp, one of the pillars of the Meta group, which achieved a turnover of 134.9 billion dollars in 2024.
