Instagram just added 90-minute videos. Here is what it means for a local business.

On 26 October, Instagram started testing something it spent years saying it would not do. The format is called Features, it is horizontal rather than vertical, and videos can run up to ninety minutes.

Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, put it plainly when announcing it: “For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram.” His stated reasoning was that shorter content drives more shares and more DMs. He did not say that had stopped being true. Something else apparently outweighed it.

What is actually confirmed

Reported on 26 October by TechCrunch, Variety and 9to5Mac:

• The format is called Features, and it is horizontal.
• Videos can run up to ninety minutes.
• It has been tested in Brazil and is expanding to a small group of selected creators in the United States.
• A companion feature, Clips as Reels, lets a creator cut a short vertical Reel out of a long video, with that Reel linking viewers through to the full thing.
• Instagram is also working on a hub for episodic Reels, along the lines of TikTok playlists.
• There is no revenue share. Meta has said a long-term monetisation model is too early to share.

That last point is the one most coverage hurried past, and it is the one that matters most if you were reading this as a YouTube replacement. On YouTube the long video can pay for itself. Here, for now, it cannot.

What is not confirmed

Several posts this week stated that Reels themselves have been extended to twenty minutes, up from ninety seconds. We could not find that in any of the main reporting, and it does not fit how Features is being described. We are not going to repeat it as though we verified it, because we did not.

Also unannounced: whether this reaches everybody, when, whether it gets its own place in the app, and what it does to the main feed.

Should a local business care yet?

Mostly no, and that is not a dodge.

If you run a restaurant, a contracting business or a clinic, nobody is going to watch ninety minutes of you. The format is pointed at podcasters, comedians and people who already make long content for a living. Those are the creators named in the coverage. With no revenue share attached, there is no money in filling the format for its own sake either.

The half that does matter

Clips as Reels is the interesting part, and it is the part nobody is writing headlines about.

If you already sit down and talk for forty minutes — a podcast episode, a webinar, a long customer question-and-answer, a training session you run for staff — that recording stops being a dead file. It becomes a source. The short vertical clip does the reach, and the long version sits behind it for the small number of people who want all of it.

That is a very different proposition from “make long videos”. It is much closer to something we already argue: that footage is inventory rather than a post.

What we would actually do about it

• Nothing urgent. You almost certainly do not have access. It is a small test in two countries.
• Stop deleting your long recordings. If you record calls, talks or sessions, keep them. Storage costs nothing and the tools for using them are arriving.
• Keep making the short thing. Shares and DMs still come from short vertical video. The head of Instagram said so while announcing the opposite, which is worth noticing.
• Do not rebuild anything around an unconfirmed feature. If a tactic only works because of something a platform has not committed to, it has a short shelf life.

The honest summary: a genuinely large strategic move by Instagram, and almost no immediate consequence for a business with one location and a phone that needs to ring.