At the same time as Facebook and Snapchat are stocking up on original shows, media companies are independently producing episodic series for Facebook-owned Instagram.
Sometime last year, Bustle Editor in Chief Kate Ward saw a tweet from someone asking whether watching Snapchat Stories had replaced TV as a before-bed ritual for anyone else.
“It kind of got us thinking about the experience of Snapchat Stories and eventually Instagram Stories, where it’s just a place where you share something with your friends but also a place where you can really program something and take advantage of the platform itself to come up with these fun, little, brief storytelling elements,” said Ward.