Instagram was announced on Friday that will now allow you to go back and view Reels you’ve previously watched thanks to a new “Watch History” feature. Rival TikTok has had a Watch History feature for a few years now.
With the new feature, you can go back and find videos you might not have had a chance to save. For example, you might be watching an interesting Reel and then receive a phone call, or accidentally close the app while watching, or get distracted by something else and lose your place in the Reels stream.
“Have you ever tried to go back to a reel you saw on Instagram and just can’t find it?” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri. communication. “Well, there’s a new feature to help you out. If you go to ‘Profile’ and ‘Settings’ under ‘Your Activity’ there’s now Watch History so you can see every reel you’ve ever watched.”
Like TikTok, you can sort your Watch History by date, the previous week or month, or a specific date range. Additionally, you can remove reels from your watch history if you wish.
Instagram Watch History offers a bit more flexibility compared to TikTok as you can sort videos chronologically or reverse chronologically or by author.
Instagram says this feature has been in high demand among users. Before that, users had found solutions to recover lost videos like downloading their data from the app and browsing it to recover watch history. The feature makes the process of finding lost videos much simpler and gets rid of the need for such solutions. Moreover, it brings the viewing experience of Instagram Reels on par with that of TikTok.
Since launching as a TikTok clone, Meta has built Instagram Reels with features already available on the popular short-form app. More recently, Instagram began allowing creators to link multiple reels in a row and launched support for Picture-in-Picture viewing, which are already available on TikTok.
