Longer Instagram Reels could soon be a thing

According to a new leak, Instagram could be working on allowing users to create longer Reels than is currently possible. Alessandro Paluzzi, a popular tipster and reverse engineer on Twitter who has released many a juicy preview of upcoming app updates, has discovered that the Meta-owned platform is preparing to introduce a 90-second limit on Instagram Reels, to replace the current 60-second cap on publications.

While it’s not a guarantee, Paluzzi has been right many times before, and using his skills as a mobile developer to reverse-engineering the Instagram app allows him to see strings of code from upcoming updates that are invisible to the rest of us.

Instagram Reels, giving users the ability to create short-form video clips, launched back in 2020. It was modeled after TikTok, which was already exponentially growing in popularity just for this reason. After Instagram Reels took off immediately, YouTube decided to copy the platform and create its own version of TikTok, which it called YouTube Shorts.

Although Shorts are still a beta feature on YouTube, they have already become massively popular with the top creators, who are using them to capture viewers’ attention on upcoming videos, advertise their merch, make announcements, or post quick updates on how their lives are going.

And now, Instagram seems to be paving the way for another possible change to short-form video style by raising the upper limit to video length, which is still at 60 seconds for YouTube Shorts.

While some people are getting excited at the prospect of adding even more material to their Reels, other have expressed concern that this won’t help users succeed on the platform, because people’s attention spans are only getting shorter—not longer.

Remember, from back in the day when YouTube became popular, the algorithms have been favoring increasingly shorter and shorter videos. TikTok’s most popular posts are under a minute long, as are the relatively new YouTube Shorts. Do you think 90-second Reels will take off, or nah? Do let us know in the comments!