The head of Instagram just said the quiet part on camera. "For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram," Adam Mosseri said in a horizontal video posted to the platform on Monday, sitting beside Instagram's VP of product, Tessa Lyons.

Then he announced the opposite.

On October 26, 2026, Instagram announced Features, a new long-form, horizontal video format, revealed by Mosseri and Lyons in a roughly six-and-a-half-minute announcement video. It lets creators upload horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes. Variety reports 90 minutes is one of several length limits being tested.

Most of the coverage has been about the number. Ninety minutes. Instagram versus YouTube. Round two of IGTV.

That's the least interesting part of this for anyone who coaches for a living.

The thing that actually matters is the link

Here is Mosseri describing, almost perfectly, the workflow that half this industry has been running for five years:

"You slice it up, you use platforms like Instagram as the top of funnel to raise awareness and then you kind of go to, you know, a podcast player or YouTube or wherever to watch the full-length thing."

You know the version of that sentence you've been living. Clip the best 40 seconds of the episode. Post the Reel. Write "full episode in bio." Watch the Reel do 90,000 views and the episode do 400 plays.

That gap is exactly what Instagram says it's targeting: creators today often post a clip and then point people to YouTube, and linked Reels aim to keep that whole journey inside Instagram.

The mechanism is a second test running alongside Features. Called Clips as Reels, it lets participating creators link up to eight Reels clips to a longer video, so viewers can move from a teaser to the full video without leaving Instagram. Viewers who tap the prompt are taken to the longer, horizontal version.

Eight clips. One long video. Eight separate shots at the algorithm, all pointed at the same destination.

The Publish Press described these clips as top-of-funnel for long-form videos posted in-app, creating a native pathway from short to long that has historically been nonexistent.

If you run a podcast, a weekly teaching show, a client interview series, or long keynote footage, that sentence is the whole story. Not the 90 minutes. The handoff.

Why Mosseri said no for years

His old objection was never about video length. It was about friendship. "If you watch a 10- or 20-minute video, you see less content from friends, you interact with your friends less and you're actually less likely to send that content or that video to a friend," he said at the time, framing long-form as something that would undermine Instagram's core identity.

He repeated a version of that logic this week, noting short videos drive more shares and DMs among users.

The new framing is that the two formats feed each other. Mosseri said one of his concerns with longer videos was cannibalizing engagement with short-form, but he hoped the longer videos would be "symbiotic" with the shorter content — people who watch a few clips as Reels may want to watch the full episode on their TV.

The TV part is real, by the way. Instagram's TV app has reached Apple TV in the US and will carry Features, and Lyons said the company believes the best viewing experience for long-form horizontal video is on a large screen.

A 60-minute coaching conversation on someone's living room television is a genuinely different product from a Reel watched in a queue at Starbucks.

Now the part nobody is putting in the headline

You cannot use this. Almost certainly not today.

The test is starting with a small group of creators in the US, with some in Brazil also taking part, Instagram spokesperson Megan Buckley told The Verge. Instagram describes the US group as "a small test," with plans to expand to tens of thousands of US creators according to The Hollywood Reporter — and Instagram has not published broader eligibility rules.

The company is currently targeting comedians and podcasters, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Not business coaches. Not wellness experts. Entertainment first, as always.

There's also no money in it yet. On monetisation, a Meta spokesperson said it is too early to share a long-term model, and the company is exploring ways for creators to earn from brands, fans and Instagram, including performance-based incentives. Lyons said established creators can bring their existing brand deals to Features, that Instagram is working on deals with some early creators, and that the videos will not be exclusive to Instagram.

One more practical wrinkle: as it stands, it doesn't sound like Instagram will let users leave the app and keep listening to a Feature. For podcast-first coaches whose audience listens while driving or at the gym, that's not a footnote. That's the use case.

And the ghost in the room has a name. Instagram previously pursued long-form video through IGTV, a separate app launched in 2018 and discontinued in 2022.

Mosseri didn't pretend otherwise. "It's going to take some time to get right, but I'm actually very excited about it, and we're very committed to it long term," he said.

What to do before you're invited

Don't move your library. It's still a test with no confirmed payouts or timeline.

Do start cutting differently. If the unit of distribution becomes eight clips pointing at one episode rather than one clip pointing at a bio link, the clipping strategy most coaches use — three highlights from the first ten minutes — is already wrong. Spread them across the whole thing. Give each one a different job.

And watch who gets invited next. Mosseri said Features will begin rolling out in a limited way this month, with more users getting access over time. "We want to be the most culturally relevant platform, and to do that, we need to show up where people are," he told creator duo Colin and Samir.

Where people are, right now, is still YouTube. That's the entire point of this.