🎬 Instagram Goes Long

👋 Morning. It’s looking like rain on Halloween in LA. If you don’t have a costume yet, a few rainproof ideas, free of charge:

Reply with yours. If it’s good, maybe we’ll include it Friday. Anyway, welcome to your midweek edition of The Dailies. Top off that coffee, and let’s get into it. 👇

Instagram, the app that trained a generation to lose interest after 1.5 seconds, would now like you to settle in for a 90-minute video. On Monday it started testing Features, horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, with tens of thousands of US creators. Same day, it put its Instagram for TV app on Apple TV, where Features will eventually live too. Long videos, big screens. Sounds a lot like YouTube. The details:

There'll be hurdles. YouTube pays, and pays well: creators keep 55% of the ad money, and plenty of them make a full-time living off it. Instagram hasn't said what it'll pay, so the offer right now is exposure. (Creators have heard that one before.) The audience is a question mark, too. Scrollers don't automatically become sit-down viewers because you made the videos longer. And this isn’t Instagram’s first swing. IGTV, its long-form video app from 2018, came and went by 2022, quietly.

The bigger picture: This is really about hours on the TV screen, and YouTube has more of them than anyone. Nielsen's latest Gauge had it at a record 15.8% of all US TV viewing in August, more than double Netflix's 7.7%. That gap is why Netflix has spent the past year poaching top creators and podcasters. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri points out that YouTube has stopped growing on phones and “all their growth is coming on TV.” Translation: the living room is where the growth is, so that's where Instagram wants to be, too.

Related: Oh, and keep an eye on Spotify. The Duplass Brothers just made 'The Long Long Night,' their six-episode indie series starring Mark Duplass and Barrett O'Brien, free on Spotify. Two episodes a week. Spotify says it's becoming a video destination alongside music and podcasts.

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Since the 2023 strikes, microdramas have been a rare growth area in Hollywood. They've brought quick shoots, cheap budgets, and work for actors and crews nobody else was calling. A slew of big players have jumped into the space too: Fox bought into Holywater, TikTok launched PineDrama, and a 'Top Gun: Maverick' producer started his own app, to name a few.

But it turns out there's an asterisk: making the shows is the easy part. Getting anyone to watch them is burning through the budget:

AI isn't helping. Two-thirds of the shows released outside China in Q3 were AI-generated, up from just 3% in Q1. So there's way more noise and the same number of eyeballs. The good news: live-action shows stay in the top 10 longer than AI ones, and China, the market that’s furthest down the AI road (91% of Q3 releases), is already reversing course toward human-made shows.

So is this thing just getting started, or already over? Hernan Lopez, whose firm Owl & Co. tracks the vertical market, says we're early: probably fewer than 20% of Americans open a vertical app in any given month. In China it's basically everyone. Plenty of room to grow.

Looking ahead… Holywater's CEO is already saying more apps will close, and he's openly hoping Hollywood comes in to consolidate. Lopez's bet is that the first big hit comes when a studio or streamer finally spends real marketing money on an original. The format looks durable. The apps on their own, less so.

🤑 'Elden Ring' is the priciest movie ever shopped at a film market. A24 will shop Alex Garland’s video game adaptation to overseas distributors at AFM starting Nov. 10, hoping to offset a budget near $200M. Amazon MGM beat the market to it, locking up international pay-1 rights (the first streaming window after theaters).

🎙️ Netflix has a podcast chief now. The streamer hired ex-Apple Podcasts exec Steve Wilson to run its podcast division, just over a week after overhauling its content team and hiring Peter Rice as head of content. Translation: the streamer is done testing the waters with licensed shows and is now building a real podcast operation.

🌴 LA just made it cheaper to shoot small. The City Council passed two motions yesterday: free permits for crews of 10 or fewer (student films, docs, microdramas) and $1 rentals of city-owned lots and buildings for crew parking, base camp, and the like. On-location shoot days fell another 4.8% last quarter, so every bit helps.

🚪 Skydance is offering buyouts before the layoffs start. David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz told staff Monday that eligible employees get a one-time buyout offer as Paramount and WBD combine, and everyone else heads back to the office five days a week. The company's trying to carve out $6B+ in annual savings, and this is step one.

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