Between November 2024 and July 2026, eight major streaming services shipped a TikTok-style vertical video feed. In all the launch coverage, earnings calls, and press releases those launches generated, not one executive at any of the eight companies has framed the feed as a way to reach new customers.
The explanations read more like searching for a problem rather than finding a solution. Subscribers are fleeing; the feeds are a panic response. The mergers need value propped up; the feeds boost revenue. Growth has stalled; the feeds are a lunge at younger viewers. I spent the past month checking each of those stories against shareholder letters, press releases, and analyst data, and each argument falls short.
What’s actually happening is stranger, and it points at a bigger miss.
A short-form feed built from clips, scenes, and trailers is marketing material. Locking it behind the paywall is like playing a trailer before the movie it promotes.
The introduction of verts
Tubi moved first, shipping Scenes in November 2024. ESPN made Verts a dedicated tab in its direct-to-consumer launch in August 2025. Disney+ announced Verts at CES and rolled it out to US subscribers in March 2026. Netflix announced Clips in May 2025 and shipped it in April 2026, the same month an unnamed feed appeared inside Paramount+ (without a formal announcement). Prime Video followed with Clips (tiered rollout, not available on my device at publication), in May 2026. Peacock shipped a feed alongside original microdramas in June, making it the only platform producing original content for the format. HBO Max came into play with Shorts, their US, iOS-only beta, in July 2026.
When a whole industry converges on a format in under two years, you would assume there is a consensus as to what problem they believe they’re solving.
The desperation story doesn’t survive earnings season
Take the popular theories one at a time. Subscribers are leaving? Every one of these subscriber bases was growing when its feed shipped. Netflix went from 301 million paid subscribers in 2024 to more than 325 million by its last disclosed count at the end of 2025. Disney’s direct-to-consumer operating income grew 88% in its fiscal Q2 2026. Peacock posted its first-ever quarterly profit, $189 million in Q2 2026, with subscribers up 12%. HBO Max added more than eight million streaming subscribers in a single quarter, passing 140 million. Even category-level churn improved, from 4.8% a month to 4.6%, per Antenna’s Premium SVOD Year in Review.
Growth stalled? Not where anyone was looking. The metric that actually is stagnant is watch time. Netflix served 96 billion viewing hours in the back half of 2025 and 97 billion in the first half of 2026, per its What We Watched engagement reports, essentially flat across its largest subscriber base ever. Subscriber growth is healthy. Engagement per subscriber is the number that won’t move, and that distinction turns out to explain nearly everything about why these feeds exist and where they were placed.
The merger story runs backwards
Consolidation panic makes an even worse explanation, because the timeline runs the wrong way. Netflix announced its vertical feed in May 2025. Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t open the strategic review that put it in play until October 2025, and Paramount didn’t win the auction, at $31 a share, until February 2026. Disney and Amazon aren’t parties to any merger at all.
The two companies that are merging shipped last and shipped worst. Paramount+ runs the feed analysts single out for botched reformatting, and HBO Max is still an iOS-only test. If merger chaos were the engine, its products wouldn’t be the stragglers. HBO Max had also stopped ordering short-form originals back in 2022, four years before there was a merger to blame.
The gold rush is over
Why would eight companies ship the same product into a market that was growing, profitable, and calming down? Because executives are panicking about the cool down.
Every executive at a streaming service today came up during a gold rush. Over the past fifteen years the industry compounded, new markets were conquered, new services launched, and subscriber charts climbed and climbed, and execs basked in the glory of seizing a new frontier. Now they’ve built their homestead and found their people. This is homeostasis: subscriber bases steady, churn evening out, watch time flat. Consumers have settled into their two or three services and a monthly bill they barely think about (save for the serial churners). Streaming in 2026 is as boring and as ubiquitous as linear television once was. They’re all crashing down after the high of winning the distribution war.
To execs whose adrenaline is in freefall, this is an emergency demanding a shiny new answer, and the shiniest object in video right now is a TikTok-style feed. It reminds me of when Facebook introduced the hamburger menu on mobile and every other app raced to jump on the bandwagon.
Executive excuses
"We're trying to give people reasons to open up our app every single day, and we know the value of one incremental hour per user per month."
Vertical videos "are really great as daily habits," with the goal of making Disney+ a "must-visit daily destination."
"We're pleased with the early progress we're making with vertical clips for choosing [what to watch] on mobile."
The feed exists to drive visit frequency and time in app.
Every bit of reasoning is about engagement and implementation is focused on subscriber engagement. Netflix Clips is subscribers-only and scoped to your profile. Disney+ Verts is for US subscribers. HBO Max positions Shorts as a way “for subscribers to find something to watch.” Peacock killed its free tier for new users back in January 2023, so its feed sits behind the paywall by default. Paramount+ has no free tier for a feed to sit in. The clean exceptions are Tubi, which is 100% free with no payment mechanism at all, and Amazon’s MX Player in India; ESPN has a free “Discover” feed with SportsCenter placed behind a paywall. Prime Video placement is unverified.
Training people to scroll and hoping they’ll stream
The bet is that a daily habit of thirty-second clips will ripen into longer viewing and a stickier subscription. That is a strange thing for a catalog business to want, because every hour a subscriber spends in the feed is an hour rehearsing the one behavior the catalog can’t monetize – doomscrolling. If you’re swiping every few seconds, chances are slim you put your phone down and lean back to watch a 52-minute episode. If the feeds work exactly as designed (cue the consonance of losses designed as wins), these services will have primed their own audiences for shorter attention inside an app whose entire inventory runs long.
Even if for some obscure reason the play was a new content category, the world is not short on vertical feeds; TikTok, Reels, and Shorts are free and bottomless. Nobody is adding $9.99 a month to their bill for another doomscroll.
And the attention-span premise underneath the whole bet is folklore. The endlessly cited eight-second figure comes from a report measuring time spent on a web page; viewing studies actually put sustained attention at 45 to 90 minutes. People possess the attention for long-form content.
The rest of the retention case is just as thin. No company has published engagement figures. No streamer has announced ads in the feeds. Antenna’s data shows the levers that actually move churn are tenure (how long someone has held the subscription) and bundling (whether it’s packaged with other services, so canceling means unwinding the whole deal), not daily habit.
"Hollywood’s Vertical Video Strategy Is Dead Wrong."
— LightShed Partners
The strategy and the format are at odds. But there is a place where verts belong.
Verts Upstream
Of all the wishmaking the execs espoused, Sarandos’s was most on point, because “choosing” is the real problem. There are now more than 2.7 million unique titles available across cable and streaming, per Nielsen’s State of Play. The average viewer spends 10.5 minutes browsing before watching anything. One in five abandons the session without watching at all. Among Gen Z and Millennials, 46% say choosing what to watch takes longer than watching it, per Bango’s survey of 2,500 US consumers. Amazon’s own pitch for vertical framing is that it puts up to 50% more titles on screen at once.
A swipeable feed of scenes and clips is a genuinely good answer to that problem. Instead of reading a wall of thumbnail tiles, the viewer samples the content itself, thirty seconds at a time, until something hooks them.
The catch is who has the problem. A subscriber stuck browsing for 10.5 minutes is annoyed. A prospect who can’t tell whether your catalog is worth paying for never gets annoyed; they close the app store page and never subscribe. The choosing problem is most expensive precisely where the locked feeds can’t reach.
The services giving the feed away are using it correctly
Watch the services that skipped the paywall. Tubi’s Scenes feed is open to anyone, because everything on Tubi is. Amazon’s MX Player runs Fatafat, a free, ad-supported microdrama feed in India. Fox’s My Drama runs coin-unlock freemium at 99 coins an episode, earnable through rewarded ads. Each of those puts sampling in front of people who haven’t paid and lets the content do the selling.
The locked feeds, meanwhile, are built in ways that can’t reach a prospect even by accident. They personalize on watch history, which requires a logged-in account. Share links deep-link back into the app, which the recipient must already have installed. Follow the design decisions and you find subscriber features, built by subscriber teams, measured on subscriber metrics, in a format whose superpower is introducing content to strangers.
A feed is a funnel stage
The pattern underneath this one repeats across the subscription industry, well beyond streaming. Teams build rich, tested, personalized experiences for the people who already pay, while the journey that turns a stranger into a subscriber gets a static landing page and a price. That asymmetry is why subscription orchestration — the practice of designing, testing, and optimizing the complete subscriber journey, from first impression to first payment and beyond, across every platform — treats the funnel as one continuous surface instead of a wall with product on one side and marketing on the other. A vertical feed is a stage in that journey. Which stage it serves is a decision, and seven of the eight streamers have so far made it retention by default.
The feeds themselves will keep improving. Recommendation models get better with every swipe, and Peacock’s microdramas suggest original formats are coming. The first major streamer to put a version of its feed in front of the paywall, seeded with its strongest scenes and wired to a subscribe flow, will find out what the format was actually for. Everyone else will keep pointing their best marketing at the people who already pay, and wondering why subscribers cancel while prospects scroll past.
