Instagram to stop supporting the IGTV app

Instagram announced that it will no longer support the separate IGTV app, sharing in a blog post that it will rather focus on keeping all videos in the main Instagram app (via TechCrunch). While the writing has been on Instagram's YouTube wall competitor for a while, the official closure announcement marks the end of an era for one of Instagram's forays into video.

In its post, Instagram says it's getting rid of the standalone IGTV app as "part of [its] efforts to make a video as simple as possible to discover and create." The post also says that any video in the main app will have a full-screen viewer and a tap to mute and that Instagram is working consistently to share the different types of videos (such as video posts or Reels). The company also plans to "testing a new ad experience on Instagram, which will allow creators to earn revenue from ads displayed on their reels" later this year.

The standalone IGTV app was announced in 2018 and was meant to compete head-to-head with YouTube by acting as a place to post long-form vertical videos. Less than a year later, IGTV content was heavily promoted in the main Instagram app, with videos appearing on the Explore page and previews in stories and the main feed. In 2020, Instagram removed the button that took you to IGTV content on the main app, citing the fact that very few people used it, and late last year, the company announced that IGTV would be renamed "Instagram TV" and that IGTV time -Long time limit would also come to regular videos.

While the IGTV app will be gone, along with the In-Stream ads that were inserted into videos longer than a minute, Instagram has made it abundantly clear that it still intends to focus heavily on video. Monday's blog post announcing IGTV's retirement is titled "Continuing our video investment on Instagram," and last year, the Instagram leader said it was no longer a photo app, but rather chasing competitors like TikTok and YouTube in a bid to become mainstream entertainment application

Since then, we've seen Meta offer creators bonuses of up to $35,000 to post Reels, and plenty of new video features have been added to the main Instagram app, though many of them are copied from TikTok.