Instagram is making a more deliberate push to move Reels beyond the smartphone, launching a new creator-led campaign that presents its connected-TV app as something people can watch together in the living room.
The campaign, called “Watch While,” focuses less on explaining the mechanics of Instagram for TV and more on showing how the service might fit into everyday routines. Creators are shown using Reels while spending time with friends and family, stretching before a walk, cooking, or sharing other casual activities. The message is straightforward: Instagram wants short-form video to feel less like an individual scrolling habit and more like shared entertainment on the biggest screen in the house.
The timing is significant. Reels now accounts for about half of the time people spend on Instagram, while connected TVs are becoming an increasingly important viewing surface for short-form video. Instagram’s latest campaign suggests the company is no longer treating television as a side experiment.
A Campaign Built Around Shared Viewing
The new promotional push features creators including Ameya Okamoto, Vikram Thanigaivelan and Carson Gillaspia, each demonstrating a different way Instagram for TV could be used at home.
Rather than staging the campaign around a polished TV-interface demonstration, the clips lean into ordinary situations. One shows Reels being watched while friends spend time together. Another centers on fitness content before a family walk. Food, recipe and travel content are also used to demonstrate how material normally consumed on a phone can work as background or group viewing on a television.
The campaign was filmed in creators’ apartments in New York and uses an intentionally informal style instead of conventional product advertising. The approach fits the behavior Instagram is trying to encourage: the TV is not positioned as a replacement for the mobile app, but as another place where the same creator ecosystem can be consumed.
That idea has been part of Instagram’s TV strategy from the beginning. “We’ve heard from our community that Instagram for TV is often a shared experience,” the company said while outlining its latest TV features.
Instagram for TV Has Expanded Quickly
Instagram first began testing its revamped television experience on Amazon Fire TV in December 2025. The app then expanded to Google TV in February 2026, followed by Samsung Smart TVs in the United States in June.
The Samsung rollout covered 2020 model-year televisions and newer. With Amazon Fire TV, Google TV and Samsung included, Instagram said the app had reached the majority of connected-TV devices in the U.S.
The TV experience is not simply a phone feed stretched across a larger display. Reels are organized into interest-based channels covering categories such as comedy, sports, music, travel and creators, making the interface better suited to people choosing something to watch together.
Instagram has also been testing the ability to cast Reels from a phone, view Stories on a TV and provide a dedicated home for horizontal video. Casting is available on Google TV and Fire TV, including videos from a user’s Saved collection.
The horizontal-video experiment is particularly notable because Instagram’s growth has been built heavily around vertical video. A television creates a fundamentally different viewing environment, and the company has acknowledged the distinction directly: “Watching on TV is different from watching on a phone.”
Reels Moves Into YouTube Territory
Instagram’s push comes as social video increasingly competes for time traditionally spent with streaming services and television.
Reels already represents roughly 50% of all time spent on Instagram. At the same time, Google previously disclosed that connected-TV screens accounted for 15% of U.S. viewing of YouTube Shorts. Those figures help explain why bringing short-form video into the living room has become strategically important.
YouTube has spent years establishing itself as a major television platform, and Shorts has been available on connected TVs since 2022. Instagram is entering that environment later, but it brings a large existing Reels audience and an enormous creator base.
The challenge is that viewing behavior changes when a feed moves from a phone held by one person to a television watched by several people. Content that works during rapid solo scrolling may not automatically translate into a shared session. Instagram’s interest-based channels, casting tools and creator-led campaign appear designed to address that difference by giving viewers more deliberate ways to choose what appears on screen.
Longer Creator Formats Come Into View
The TV campaign is not the end of Instagram’s plans for the format. The company has been exploring longer creator videos, episodic series and live programming designed specifically for television viewing.
Instagram is also encouraging creators to experiment with episodic microdramas and live shows that could work inside the expanded TV feed. That points to a potentially larger change than simply allowing users to watch existing Reels on another device.
Longer-form programming could give creators more room to develop recurring shows or series that sit somewhere between a conventional Reel and YouTube-style long-form content. Episodic formats could also make Instagram for TV more intentional: instead of opening the app only to move through unrelated clips, viewers could return for a particular creator, program or series.
For creators, that creates a new set of production questions. Vertical framing remains central to mobile Reels, but living-room viewing favors larger displays, different composition and content capable of holding the attention of several people at once. Instagram’s horizontal-video test shows that the company recognizes TV cannot simply copy the phone experience.
A New Fight for the Living-Room Screen
The campaign shows Instagram trying to change a behavior before it tries to dominate a category. People already know how to watch Reels on phones. The harder task is convincing them that opening Instagram on a television is useful enough to become routine.
That helps explain why “Watch While” emphasizes social moments instead of technical features. Instagram is effectively selling a new context for Reels: something that can remain on while people cook, exercise, talk or spend time together, rather than content that demands one person continuously swipe a screen.
For advertisers and creators, the shift could eventually matter just as much as it does for viewers. Connected-TV viewing creates a different advertising environment, while longer and episodic content could give creators formats that are difficult to support inside a conventional short-video feed.
Instagram has not announced a wider international timetable for its TV app, and several of the more ambitious formats remain in testing. For now, the service is still better understood as an expanding U.S. experiment than a finished global product.
But the direction is becoming clearer. Instagram spent years teaching users to watch short-form video vertically and largely on their own phones. Its latest campaign is now trying to establish a different habit: Reels can also be something people put on the television and watch together.
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