Meta has started giving selected creators access to Series, a feature that turns individual Reels into episodes of one story. Each series gets its own tab on the profile, and viewers work through the episodes in order, picking up where they left off. When someone meets an episode in the feed or on the Reels tab, a tap opens the whole collection.
The feature runs on Instagram and Facebook, and creators can add both new and older Reels to it. According to TechCrunch, Meta is considering how to monetise Series, but it has not yet said what form that will take. TikTok launched a similar feature, also called Series, back in 2023, when it let creators offer premium content behind a paywall.
Episodic content at rivals
Meta’s move comes as competitors strengthen episodic content. TikTok is producing series with Hoorae Media, the production company of Issa Rae. The first of them, the vertical micro-drama Screen Time, premiered on 29 April 2026. Its first part consists of 27 episodes of roughly one minute each. The first episode passed 22 million views, and the series gathered almost 75 million in its first week. According to TheWrap, it had the highest seven-day viewing time of any series on TikTok and in the PineDrama app. The second part followed on 22 May.
On 3 June, at the Vertical Media Summit, TikTok announced, together with Sundance Collab, a screenwriting programme for microseries, a four-week online course with global applications open until 1 July. Dawn Yang, TikTok’s head of entertainment partnerships, said that “TikTok has become a home for serialized storytelling, where original microseries find audiences faster and more authentically than ever before”. Patty West, director of Sundance Collab, added that “The microseries format is genuinely exciting to us because its constraints produce exactly the kind of creative pressure that generates the most original work”.
Reels heads for the TV screen
The same direction shows up in hardware. Instagram began testing its own TV app on 16 December 2025 on Amazon Fire TV devices, first in the US. The app is designed for watching Reels with a remote control. Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product, backed this up with research in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “One of the things that we've seen recently is that even without us building anything for TV, we were hearing in research that people were already mirroring their phone onto their TVs in order to watch Reels with their friends.”
According to the autumn 2025 update of Deloitte Digital Media Trends, 41% of US consumers regard watching social video and streaming services as a form of “watching TV”. Some 35% of respondents spend more time on social video than on streaming, rising to 58% among Gen Z and 44% among millennials.
AVMSD already covers video platforms
Both companies are launching these steps in the US first. Europe, meanwhile, already has a regulatory framework that places video platforms among audiovisual media. The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) covers video-sharing platforms, and the Commission has adopted guidelines on how to interpret their definition. The Commission is leading a review of the directive, planned for 2026, as part of the European Democracy Shield initiative. The concrete impact on short social video will depend on the outcome of the review, its interpretation and enforcement.
The Series feature, the Hoorae series, the Sundance course and Instagram on Fire TV all point to the same place. Short video is taking on a structure, monetisation and a screen that until now belonged to television.
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