Hyderabad: Instagram appears to be trying its hand at long-form videos and competing against YouTube, once again. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Meta-owned photo- and video-sharing platform, on Monday, started testing horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes with select creators in the US.

The new product will reportedly be called Features and targets podcasters, comedians, and other long-form creators. It is also said to come with the ability to redirect viewers from short-form Reels to the full version of the content.

In a statement to THR, Tessa Lyons, VP Product, Instagram, said that creators will be able to link their big horizontal uploads to Reels, allowing users to click on the short vertical video of something like a clip of a podcast and select to watch the full-length video.

The long videos will be recommended to users on its Explore page along with other areas. As per the report, creators involved in the early test for the new Features product include podcast host and Skims co-founder Emma Grede, beauty and fashion creator Monet McMichael, football content creator Donald De La Haye, and American street interviewer and content creator Preston Rakovsky.

This will be the second attempt from Instagram in the long-form video space after the failure of IGTV, which was phased out as the platform shifted its focus to Reels.

However, back then Instagram was mostly used as a photo-sharing platform. Now, Instagram users are more accustomed to watching video content on the platform and may be pushed towards watching full-length videos—at least that's what Instagram may be hoping.

Creators are already using Instagram Reels to post short clips of their full-length content, such as podcast snippets and stand-up comedy bits, to market their original content. Instagram may also be hoping to bank on the trend and build its long-form content library.

Meanwhile, YouTube is leaning heavily towards short-form content as it continues to feature them at the top of the mobile application's home page as well as in the search results. Filtering Short Videos on YouTube is a conscious decision that users need to make every time they search something on the platform.

THR reports that Features on Instagram will be available on mobile, but the platform wants to carry the viewing experience over to Instagram for TV, which launched last year with Samsung, Fire TV, Google TV and is now expanding to Apple TV. 

“We think the best viewing experience for long-form horizontal content is on a big, horizontal screen," Lyons told THR. "And so I think that is where we will expect a lot of the deep consumption to happen over time."