Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
One funny thing about the streaming wars is that, for nearly as long as they’ve been happening, TV viewing in general — the ritual of sitting on a couch staring into the screen — has been going through a crisis of its own. Sure, Netflix was battling HBO Max and eating away at cable and the stakes were high, but also, plenty of people were just looking at their phones, scrolling through social media, texting with their friends, or shopping for socks. For a while, TV executives fretted about losing attention to “second screens.” Eventually, some of them started talking about TV as the second screen.
Meanwhile, the boundary between these modes of consumption got fuzzier. People were watching longer stuff on smaller screens and shorter stuff on bigger screens. Netflix got into mobile games and started experimenting with social-media-style video feeds; in January, Nielsen reported that YouTube had beaten out Netflix as the most-watched service on actual televisions. In 2025, the future of TV is … video podcasts?
YouTube’s TV takeover has its own strange context: On smartphones, the company spent years pushing creators to make TikTok-style short videos and nudging users into TikTok-style endless scrolling. At the same time, TikTok and Instagram, which had been turned into a TikTok clone, were experimenting with longer YouTube-style videos. With that in mind, this report from Kaya Yurieff and Kalley Huang at the Information sort of makes sense:
Meta Platforms’ leaders have said they are planning to develop a version of the Instagram app designed for TVs, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions. That app could show content like its Reels short-form videos.
Staff at TikTok, meanwhile, have been strategizing over the last six months about how to launch a new TV app tailored for big screen viewing.
TikTok has been allowing longer videos for a while now, and Instagram has made a few attempts as well — remember IGTV? No? Of the two companies, which are chasing after user attention generally but higher TV ad rates specifically, TikTok is probably in the better position here. Creators generally see it it as the better platform not just for rapidly building a profile but for actually making money — TikTok, like YouTube, pays some creators directly, albeit typically at lower rates — which will help if TikTok expects them to invest time and effort into longer programming.
It’s also a bet, though, that people will just watch TikTok as it already exists, just on their TVs. Streaming TV and the endless feed of TikTok videos might be formally different, but in a grim, abstract sense — the sense that matters most to companies built on advertising — they’re really pretty similar: passive video-consumption platforms on which heavy viewers spend multiple hours per day. It also opens some exciting frontiers in prefrontal-cortex destruction. You could watch Instagram Reels on the big screen while you half-watch a video of a podcast on a small one. You could scroll through TikTok on the TV, with YouTube picture-in-picture on the phone, all while texting. Or, of course, you could just strap on a VR headset and turn the lights out for good.
