Instagram announced that it’s killing the pointless IGTV app. But did anyone even remember that it existed?

In an announcement to make more of an “investment” in their Reels feature, Instagram announced that it will no longer be supporting its separate IGTV app. The platform will instead focus on keeping all videos in the main Instagram app.

This announcement caught me a little off guard—was Instagram’s IGTV a standalone app? I vaguely remembered that it was announced, but I’ve never once bothered to download it… why would I? IGTV wasn’t a widely used feature on Instagram, anyway, but we could still access IGTV on the main app. I don’t need a separate app.

The IGTV app was introduced back in 2018, so it didn’t even have that long of a life. It was meant to let users watch purely IGTV videos—which were longer videos on Instagram. However, it didn’t really work—no one was looking for long-form content on Instagram.

The only reason I used IGTV to post any content was that the video I wanted to post was too long for Instagram’s regular format. If the video was a bit too long, it had to be on IGTV. But with the introduction of Reels to compete with TikTok, the existence of IGTV seems all the more pointless.

“Because of our focus on Reels, in-stream video ads (previously known as IGTV ads) will no longer be supported,” said Instagram.

It took me a while to notice, but IGTV doesn’t exist on the main app anymore, either. In fact, Instagram merged Feed Video and IGTV into one format—Instagram Video. They have since been pushing Reels even more, and Meta even offered some creators up to USD 35,000 bonuses to post Reels content.

“Reels also continues to be the largest contributor to engagement growth on Instagram, as more people watch reels to be entertained, go deeper with their interests or discover new creators,” continued Instagram.

Since they’ve been trying to push Reels to users, it makes sense that they’re trying to get rid of the daily time limit feature that was meant to help with users’ mental health breaks—to the expense of users’ mental health, I guess. I can spend an insane amount of time on TikTok and Reels, so daily time limits won’t really be ideal if Instagram is banking on beating TikTok.

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