Instagram IGTV Downloader

IGTV: the format that Instagram almost-but-didn't kill

Launched June 2018. Positioned as Instagram's answer to YouTube — long-form vertical video, up to 60 minutes, its own app icon, a separate tab in the main Instagram app. For a while Meta really pushed it. Brands made IGTV-specific content. Creators uploaded director cuts that didn't fit a regular post.

Then TikTok happened. Short-form ate long-form. Meta pivoted hard into Reels in 2020, and by mid-2021 IGTV was getting squeezed — the IGTV button moved, then shrank, then disappeared from the main nav. The standalone IGTV app was pulled in March 2022. Meta announced video formats would all be consolidated.

But the /tv/ URLs never went 404. Every IGTV ever uploaded still resolves. That's why this downloader exists — a nontrivial amount of useful long-form content lives behind /tv/ links and isn't getting re-uploaded anywhere else.

Why /tv/ links still work in 2026

When Meta merged IGTV back into regular video, they didn't migrate URLs. /tv/SHORTCODE/ stayed mapped to its original content. The web player changed (you no longer see the "IGTV" branding around it), the mobile app shows it in the regular video player UI, but the CDN path under the hood hasn't moved.

From our side, fetching a /tv/ link is mechanically identical to fetching a /reel/ or /p/ video. Same DASH manifest, same video + audio streams, same ffmpeg merge. Our backend doesn't even have a separate IGTV code path. This page exists mostly because people search for "IGTV downloader" specifically — the tool is the same tool.

This page vs the Video Downloader — same engine, same result

Honesty check: you can paste a /tv/ URL into /video-downloader and get an identical result. Both routes resolve to the same parse-and-merge backend.

The reason this page exists: when someone has a /tv/ link specifically, they often want to know "is this still supported, or do I need to find something else?" Answer is yes, still supported, paste it wherever — here or the generic video tool. Either works.

If you're in doubt about what you have, look at the URL. /tv/ = IGTV (legacy). /p/ = regular post, could be video. /reel/ = Reel. All three accepted on both pages.

File sizes are real. Plan for them.

A 60-minute IGTV at 1080p is a big file — 500 MB on the low end, 1.5 GB on the high end, depending on bitrate. Download time is mostly a function of your connection, not our server.

If you're on mobile data, think twice before hitting download. Some carriers throttle single-connection transfers past a certain size, which shows up as a progress bar that stalls around 80% for no clear reason. Not a bug on our end. Switch to wifi if you can.

On slow residential connections, expect 10+ minutes for a full HD hour-long download. Our server can feed you faster than that. The ISP bottleneck is almost always where the minutes go.

Pause, resume, what happens when your laptop sleeps

Our download endpoint supports HTTP Range requests — the mechanism browsers use to resume partial downloads. If your Wi-Fi drops mid-download, most desktop browsers will show a "Resume" button when you come back online. Click it, the download picks up from where it left off. No need to re-paste the URL or restart from zero.

Laptop sleep is less friendly. Chrome and Firefox pause in-flight downloads when the machine sleeps; whether they resume cleanly on wake depends on the browser version and how long you were asleep. If the resume fails (file shows 0 bytes, download stuck), re-paste the URL and restart. Our parse step is cached for 10 minutes, so the second paste skips straight to the stream.

Landscape IGTV — the format nobody remembers

For about a year (early 2019 into 2020), IGTV accepted landscape uploads. Meta thought people would want horizontal long-form for tablets. Almost nobody did. Creators stuck with vertical.

A few landscape IGTV videos survive from that era. They download fine, but the MP4 is genuinely 16:9 landscape — not a vertical video with letterboxing, but the real thing. On a phone, it'll play sideways (or you rotate your phone). Not a bug in our parser.

Good way to spot one before downloading: the thumbnail on Instagram's web embed will be wider than tall. If it looks like a regular YouTube thumbnail, it's landscape.