Instagram Features: The 90-Minute Brand Documentary Has Arrived

Instagram has begun testing a new format called Features: horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, announced on October 26, 2026 by head of Instagram Adam Mosseri and VP of Product Tessa Lyons. Features are discovered through linked short clips, up to eight per video, and are recommended in the main Feed and Explore. For brands, the short answer is this: Instagram now has a feature-length slot, it is built for television viewing, and for the moment brands are the ones who will pay for what fills it.

What Instagram actually announced

Features is a new format, not a longer Reel. The videos are horizontal, they run up to 90 minutes, and each one can carry up to eight linked Reels, which Instagram calls Clips as Reels. A viewer watching a clip taps "Watch full video" to enter the Feature. Instagram is testing the format with a small group of U.S. creators now, after an earlier test in Brazil, and says it will expand to tens of thousands of U.S. creators over the coming months. Access during the test is by invitation and individual arrangement. There is no announced date for general availability.

The strategy behind it is television. Instagram for TV launched on Apple TV in the United States on October 23, 2026, and already runs on Fire TV, Google TV, and Samsung TVs. Mosseri, who opposed long-form video on Instagram for years, explained the reversal this way: people love watching together in their living rooms, and doing that well takes more than short clips. YouTube currently holds the largest share of U.S. television usage of any streaming service. Instagram wants that time on its own screens.

What this means for brands

There is no advertising revenue share in Features at launch, and Instagram has said it is too early to share a long-term monetization model. What pays for long-form on Instagram right now is brand money: creators bring their own brand deals, with no exclusivity required, and Instagram is helping some early creators find brand partners. That gives brands an unusual window. While the format is new and the platform is courting it, a brand that arrives with a finished, watchable film is bringing exactly what creators and the platform both need.

The right way to judge a sponsored Feature is the way buyers judge connected TV: completion, total minutes watched, and people watching together in a living room, not raw reach. As one agency strategy chief put it in Vogue Business coverage of the shift, viewership multiplied by duration is what really matters.

What a good brand Feature looks like

Ninety minutes is a documentary's length, and it should be produced like one. The brands that win this format will not stretch a commercial. They will tell a story an audience chooses to finish: the craftsmen behind a trade, the families behind a mission, the makers behind a product. The film has to be built in segments, because the eight linked clips are the discovery engine and they must be planned in pre-production, not sliced out of the finished film as an afterthought. It has to be captioned from delivery, because Instagram's automated captions for Features are not available yet. And it has to be finished for the television in the living room, in 16:9, with framing that still works when a moment is cropped vertical for a Reel.

Why we are building for it now

This is the work Puritano Media Group has done for three decades. We produced Faces of Strength, the U.S. Army portrait film that won a Telly Award, was handed out on DVD to thousands of attendees at the Army's annual trade show, and was hosted on the Army's website. Our founder produced Smile for the Dead, a 54-minute documentary now on PBS, which won 42 festival awards. We make anniversary films, gala films, and craftsmen stories for organizations across the Washington, D.C. region, and every one of them was built the way a Feature has to be built: a real story, told by the people living it, at the length the story earns.

Our Features package is a single production: the documentary itself, the eight linked Reels designed from the first outline, captions delivered with the film, and TV-ready masters. We are offering it to brands directly and to creators working with brand partners while the test window is open. If your organization has a story that deserves more than 30 seconds, we would like to hear it.